Wood Elves.

Hi all! This would be my first post in this blog, obviously. So, firstly I have met mini war gamer Rory, as his store is located right here in sunny Stafford, and I have to tell you, he's pretty awesome.

So after that blatent advert, I have begun work on my first complete tournament army that will be for sale, at a decent price I might add. It will be 2,500 points of wood elves, partially customisable. By partially, I mean I will not be painting up extra models as spare, but I will be magnetising command options for all units that I can.

I have made progress with starting this army already, I didn't want to show you the pictures too soon as I bought the first batallion set from ebay. My advice: if you're building a professional tournament army that will be for sale AVOID ebay. The guy told me the set would include one missing Glade rider, 2 Glade Guard, and some models would be assembled. He also told me he was a professional miniature commission...guy, who assembles and paints 40k for ebay sale. When I got the set, I found all 8 Glade Riders and 3 extra horses (?), 2 Glade guard were missing, and so was one dryad. Sounds good right? His assembly skills were what made me angry though, becuase he had assembled EVERYTHING to some extent, incorrectly. This included blobs of green stuff with finger prints in, glue that obscured nearly all details it touched, limbs chopped in places, feet missing, capes glued heavily to the wrong parts, FIVE champions on foot, no mold line removal, pieces of sprue attatched to "finished models", and his test model painted "professionally" with no shading, highlights, basecoat or details, and a pallet of literally 3 colours; elf flesh, dheneb stone and knarloc green.

Ranting aside, I've cut, glued, moldline removed and shaved the miniatures, sculpted feet and magnetised command options. Luckily I have just enough pieces to work with, so nothing is missing, but I fear these models will serve only as test subjects, and when painted up nicely will find their way to ebay again as a side-sale to recover some material costs. They'll do as game miniatures, sure, but as the tournament army I want to sell, I can see an angry customer in the near future.

Anyways, here is some progress on my painting as of 21/5/10:

Wardancer:




Glade Guard:







As you can see, very GW standard, but to a lesser painting skill. I feel the summer theme is underrepresented online, but this is what I call my "summer project", so this only seemed right. Oddly enough, I expect it to be finished by autumn...

Don't expect to see too many new models until the 8th edition book is released, I bought the batallion as I know I will need everything in there, but I cannot draw up an army list unitl then. Do however, expect to see a lot more soon after July.