More Eldar

I got in the rest of what I need to make the first 1000 points of my eldar army... or so I thought. It turns out that storm guardians come 8 to a box instead of 10 to a box like I thought they did. Oops.

As I expected, the storm guardians only come with one each of the two special weapons. Fortunately the weapons are identical except for the positioning of the ammo "globule" that the eldar weapons use. Given this similarity it's rather difficult to tell the two apart from any distance, and if anyone gives me a hard time about not being 100% WYSIWYG I think I will be quite justified in smacking them upside the head with a metal dreadnaught (which I have, and may take with me to games solely for this purpose). Mind you, if GW still sold bitz I'd go ahead and buy the extra 3 flamers that I'll need to make things completely WYSIWYG, but since they don't I'm not going to spend the $90 it would cost me in order to buy three extra boxes of storm guardians just to get the flamers.

Despite my miscalculation with the Storm Guardians, I still have plenty to keep me busy. Three vehicles, and over 20 infantry models, plus conversion work on my autarchs.

Those autarchs are my two HQ choices in my full 2500 point list, although I probably won't be using both of them until I get up to 1850 or 2000 points. They are identically equipped (in my fluff for the army they are brothers), and the plan right now is to model one using a slightly modified dire avenger exarch, and the other using a conversion of the Yriel model, swapping his weapons out for a dire avenger's shuriken cannon. The only tricky bit on the Yriel conversion should be the right arm, and it shouldn't be too hard, although it will probably end up needing a little green stuff work to fill in the gaps.

The only problem I've seen with my original plan for using Yriel is that his banners have an Iyanden symbol sculpted into them. I didn't notice this when I was looking at the blister in the store because the sculpted portions face towards the back when they're in the package. I'm not looking forward to filing them off, and am thinking about using green stuff to cover them up instead. This shouldn't be a big deal in the end, but it will probably result in my doing my exarch based autarch first, instead of my Yriel based one as I'd originally planned.

As for the fire dragon squad I was working on, it's finished except for the application of some static grass to the bases and the protective clear coats. I'll try to post some pics once they're completely done. I'm pretty pleased with the results and am looking forward to painting some guardians in a similar scheme.