Forgemas 14; Eldar Corsair Hornet; The Build.

Hello All,

Bluddtoof here with my first Forgemas 14 post, the build of my first Eldar Hornet for my new Corsairs army. I'm using the, slightly out of date, lists from the Doom Of Mymaera book from Imperial Armour and in a new style for me I won't be just buying all the cool toys I can get my grubby mitts on and then leaving half of them sat on shelves for 6 years awaiting some paint! No! This army will be built and painted unit by unit to a series of lists I've written! Will wonders never cease!
So Forgemas has worked out quite well for me as it gives me an opportunity to make a start on the army and paint one of the units from my initial 750pt list. The list contains a Corsair Prince with Bladesworn retinue on a Corsair Venom, 10 Corsairs with jetpacks, 3 Corsair jetbikes, a Hornet with Pulse Lasers (the subject of this post) and a Corsair Wasp Assault Walker with scatter lasers. The bigger lists each add more units to this base list and also add points to existing units here and there. More on those over the course of 2015.
Back to the Hornet and the style of the army in general; you may have seen some of my older posts on the trial build and paint of my first Corsair, they can be found here here here and here, the idea is that the army represents a Corsair raid on an Imperial facility and as such all the bases will be cut away sections of the facility floor, each infantry and bike squad will be distinguished from the others by the type of flooring material they are stood on rather than use squad markings, which don't fit the army in my mind.
All the vehicles will be on large scenic bases, I'm going to go to town on these and make each one into a little diorama with Imperial soldiers and techs hiding or fighting or dying etc, they'll include lots of ducting and pipework both under the floors and above them.

So onto the Hornet, it took me about 8 hours to build this, the base and model combined, and also several hours of drying time for the balsa and plaster sections, all told I built in 2 days and I really enjoyed it. The kit is decent quality, a fair bit of flash to remove but no warping which can be common with resin.

To start here's a picture of the completed build, I'll follow up with some step by step notes and piccies...

Fist step was to start on the base; I wanted to depict the Hornet zipping at breakneck speed down a pipe and conduit lined trench, hunting Imperial troops, the pilot relying on his unnatural reflexes to avoid the perilous structures. To achieve this I decided to pose the Hornet at a quite steep angle with one wing down in the trench, just skimming over pipes on top of the trench wall. The trench wall was the first bit to build and is made from a frame of 10mm cross section balsa pillars, 4 in total, with 2mm balsa sheet shaped around it to form the curved surface which mimics the bases edge and the flat surfaces. I used elastic bands to hold all this in place whilst the PVA set. If you try this ensure that the curved panel has the grain running perpendicular to the direction of curve, otherwise it won't bend! Pics...

Whilst that was drying I started on the Hornet itself, all the bits washed to remove that nasty mould lubricant (the bane of paint!)...

I started on the next new technique for me; magnetising weapons. I have to say it wasn't anywhere near as hard as I'd expected and it will give me huge tactical choice at almost no cost. The magnets are inset into the joints in holes I drilled, carved and filed out very carefully. I used a total of 8 little magnets on the model, the weapon cowling magnetises to the outside of the gun so the gun has 2 magnets, that's 4 on each side. I also ensured that I used the same polarity all round so that any weapon can fit to either side of each vehicle. I'll just have to remember that when I start the next vehicle! Pics of the magnetisation...

Next step was to build the pipework sections to fit onto the base, these plastic pipes are from Nightwing International and are part of their model railway scenery range. They're injection moulded plastic on sprues, each set contains loads of bits and poly cement works a treat. It's a nice modular system allowing almost infinite variation. Pics of the pipe sections and the base with the balsa section dried and coated with a thin skim of plaster to give a nice concrete finish...

Then it was back to Hornet to fit the engine intake and thrusters to the main body...

Once the plaster was dry I did dry runs with all the elements to get the positions right, I built the hiding guardsman, who's lost his helmet, lasgun and canteen in his dash for safety and is left with just a frag grenade and a trenching tool to fight off the raiders!
He's stood on mesh walkway (The mesh is the aluminium mesh sheet used for repairing car bodywork and suchlike, dirt cheep from my local hardware store) supported on plastruct girder. Before fitting the mesh I painted the base below in deep greens and swirls of Nurgles Rot; the black base will all be painted in this way and will have a coat of a couple of mm of water effects applied at the end (This will entail me making a snug polythene mould around the base edge to hold the liquid whilst it sets).
Here's the finished build from a few angles, the Hornet, pilot, canopy, guardsman and his loose gear are all un-glued so I can paint all the bits separately.....

That's it, I'm really pleased with it and can't wait to see it painted. More posts to come as that progresses, as ever C and C welcome.

Bluddtoof.

Eldar Corsairs, The New Base Colours

Hi All

Here's pics of the first corsair model with the base edging and lower surface repainted in shaded greys rather than the original silver.

 

I definitely prefer this, it will also lend itself better to the scenery set I will eventually build to match the army.
As ever comments please.

Bloodtoof

Eldar Corsairs, The New Project, The First Painted Model

Hi All

So here it is the first finished Corsair, I've really enjoyed painting this and I like the scheme, I wasn't sure about it which was why I started with just a single member of the squad.
It fulfils my philosophy of painting gaming miniatures; most of the time you'll be looking at them from 4-8 feet away so they need to stand out, with high contrast and bright colours. The vast majority of current armies I see online have a darker, more realistic and weathered paint scheme which may well be fantastically painted and looks amazing in a cabinet and I fully appreciate and applaud the skill and quality of such work but on the gaming table these kinds of finishes seem to disappear into the background, I like to see a well painted army stand out on the battlefield where it belongs.
Anyway enough of that... Here are some piccies of the finished Eldar Corsair with Shuriken Cannon.......

I think it's come out well, I'm particularly pleased with the yellow to white shading and the base however I'm not sure of the silver base, I may change it to a weathered concrete grey instead.
As ever feedback is always welcome.
Whilst I spend a couple of weeks mulling over this colour scheme I'll be painting a couple of bits for my marines...
Bye for now....

Bluddtoof

Eldar Corsairs, The 1st Squad

Hi All

The bases are built as seen in my last post, so now for the squad itself. In terms of equipping them, I want to be able to stay at range and use their jet packs to keep moving so they need the longest range weapons available which means Lasblasters instead of shuriken catapults and I'll only be equipping 2 models per squad with special/heavy weapons, namely an Eldar missile launcher and a shuriken cannon in each squad. The fusion guns are nice but to use em you've got to be up close, not where I want my corsair infantry to be, I'll use my vehicle support and flyers for anti tank duties.
The squad will be churning out 24 lasblaster shots, 3 cannon shots and a missile each shooting phase at 24" range and then using jet packs to reposition in the assault phase. Sounds like a plan to me...

Anyway here's a few pics of the models themselves....

The models will be painted without their guns in place to make life easier, and then they'll be fixed in place once painted. As you can see in a couple of the pics I based the Felarch much earlier and originally had much fatter rivets but I didn't like em so I swapped to the filter balls method.
The models are nice to build, with the resin upgrade parts meshing easily with the plastic guardians.
The worst part was the flash on the jetpack vanes and quite a lot of warping in them too but they're nice and thin so were easy to reshape with just the warmth from my hands.
Next will be painting the first model to see if I like the colour scheme.....

Bluddtoof.

Eldar Corsairs, My New Project, Modelling the Bases

Hi All

So Worcester War 13 has been and gone and now it's time to start something new.
Last year I went to Warhammer World with some of the code boys for the Carnage tournament and whilst there I picked a few nice forgeworld bits and pieces for my long planned Eldar Corsair army.
With the release of Doom Of Mymera last year I'd written a few little lists and knew roughly what I wanted, namely a jet pack heavy infantry army with some heavy vehicle support. So most of that is bought in one form or another and just waiting for some glue and paint....
To start with I'm doing a corsair squad to test out my new colour scheme, but before even that happens I needed to sort out how I was gonna base the army up, I don't see a bunch of space pirates sporting squad markings so how to differentiate the squads since they'll be equipped similarly if not identically? I took inspiration from a guy I played against at the Spikey Clubs SVAXIII tournament earlier this year; he had a lovely Deathwatch Marine army who's individual marines each had their own chapter badge on 1 shoulder pad but no squad markings, so he'd used a unique base design for each squad, with all models in a squad having the same style of base. I liked this idea and I've stolen it and modified for my own needs.
My army represents a corsair raiding party assaulting an imperial base, so the bases will be cut-away sections of flooring complete with girders and ducting under the floor. Each squad will be identified by the type of flooring material they're stood on.

The flooring discs cut out for the first squad;

The bases with girders added. These are plastruct girder sections cut roughly to size;

Pipes and cables added;

The bases complete with the pipes and girders cut/filed and sanded to the shape of the base and with the flooring discs fixed on top;

A base with rivets added;

The rivets are made from the tiny plastic balls you find inside water filter cartridges. Each cartridge contains thousands of them as shown here,

Just drill a hole in the surface a little smaller than the ball and pop one in, I used a pair of pointy tweezers. It's a little fiddly but worth it. The filter cost a fiver and I don't think I'll ever run out!!

 The bases for the squad with rivets and some pipework coming up through the floor on one of them, this will be duplicated throughout the army.

That's the bases done, next is modelling the squad itself.

Til next time........

Bluddtoof

10

Eldar Corsairs W.I.P.

Hi All

Bluddtoof here, rested and recuperated after 2 weekends of hardcore gaming!
SVAXII and Carnage were both awesome fun and a great success for me, seeing me get my best results yet at both tournaments; 4 wins and 1 loss at SVA resulting in 12th place on VPs and 6th place on Campaign Points, at Carnage I managed 2 wins, 2 draws and 3 losses and had an absolute blast with my Orky footsloggin army. As ever my unit of renown was Grotzookas Kanz, they are quite possibly the best unit in the Ork codex point for point, they smashed everything they faced in all the games I played over both weekends and are a shoe in in almost every list I take.

However now onto something new:

My new project for the coming year; Eldar Corsairs.
Having recently decided, after 20 odd years of collecting and painting GW miniatures, that it was time I did some Eldar stuff and deciding to look at collecting a small Eldar army I bought the latest I.A. book, Doom Of Mymeara, and after reading most of it was instantly attracted to the corsair list and the potential for a high BS jet packing list, maneuverable, shooty and nice to look at!
So last weekend as I was at Warhammer World for the Carnage tournament I bought myself the bulk if the resin stuff for a 2k list focusing on jetpack units with wasp,hornet and warp hunter support.
I've made a start on the first corsair and am trying a golden scaled armour scheme, below are the first photos of the w.i.p.

White spray undercoat followed by base coat of Iyanden Darksun and then a wash of Devlan Mud. Then a coat of Shining Gold leaving the recesses shaded.

Then a highlight layer of Burnished Gold

This will be followed by successive highlights mixing in Mithral Silver. Piccies to come over the next few days.

Bluddtoof