Kill Team: Dark Eldar Kabalite Warriors (part 1)

Hello.

My first (and currently only) fully painted Dark Eldar model.

Regular readers may be wondering "Hey, wasn't that last Kill Team post about Genestealers???" And they would be correct.

Umm... bit of a hiccup in that plan, but I shall write about that in it's own post.

Meanwhile I have been pleasantly surprised to find myself working on some Dark Eldar for Kill Team. Believe it or not, it's a project I have been debating to myself about doing for many years and my clowning around was actually me toeing those proverbial waters before diving into the deep end of the pool. (Or rather, after the proverbial pool separated into two with the Harlequins becoming their own army). Kill Team now provides me with the chance to work on a few things without building the entire army, which is in the webway (storage) waiting for their day to escape into realspace...

If you have ever explored my blog you may have seen these guys on my Other Armies page in the Tertiary Armies section. I have not touched them since these photos were taken in 2013 and it had been close to three years prior to that since any work was done on them.

The Dark Eldar assembled on my old, and totally unfocused, painting station. 

In the 2010 Codex: Dark Eldar they had a color scheme in the gallery section for a Kabal called the Obsidian Rose. I was quite impressed with it and wanted to make that the Kabal I would paint and play. I had a few Dark Eldar warriors that I had put together for fun when I was first collecting them seriously around the year 2000, and decided to try the Obsidian Rose scheme on them. I was impressed with it and with how quickly the model was finished. However I was quite seriously into completely my Space Wolf projects and decided to but the whole Dark Eldar experiment onto the back burner for another time. I was also upset about the transition to Finecast and my inability to get some of the new range models in metal before it was too late.

Obsidian Rose paint scheme reference pic.

Back to the present, and I took this pic (above) to help me try to figure out just how I went about painting this scheme and what were the exact paints I had used to do it. Luckily, I had stopped this project in mid-stage so the incomplete models have acted like a road map in helping me figure that out. I will likely do one of my typical stage-by-stage posts on this scheme soon so I can view it for my own future reference.

For now though, let's get back to the unit construction for Kill Team. As I said above, all of my unassembled and unopened boxes of Dark Eldar are in storage, but I had a baggy full of old Dark Eldar models, bitz and scraps that Mike had given to me. There was enough to make nine fully assembled models. I rebuilt and primed the three mostly finished models and ordered some bitz from ebay to give the rest of these models some variety.

Not as much variety as a Rush concert, but close...

After an evening of kit-bashing I was fairly impressed with the initial results. The woman in the pic above is to be a Sybarite, However I decided that if I was going to use the new style arms that I would have to it in pairs otherwise one arm would look bigger than the other. So the arm with the double-blade knife was removed, and you can see below that I decided to switch it with a newer style arm holding a grenade.

Sybarite. -Is it me, or does she look really pissed off?

These next two pics are of the model I decided will be the Leader in Kill Team games. She is also a Sybarite.

Sybarite and Kill Team Leader

 I decided she needed a powersword but the only bitz I had handy were from an old Craftworld Eldar sprue (that's another army I haven't touched in ages by-the-way). I thought it needed something flashy so I stuck a plume of hair/fur hanging off of the sword pommel. This is a bit from the original plastic Dark Eldar models that is intended to be used as a sort of crest on the helmets of those models. I think it turned out cool.

The Blade of Ticklish Distraction?

Also while building this model the idea to put a bladed crest behind her head came to me and I had to try it out. Pretty simple idea and I think it works. It kind of mocks the vanes that some of their Craftworld brethren have. I like it so much that I went back and added one to the first Sybarite also.

Next up was the opportunity to add special weapons. The lack of special weapons was an annoying short-coming of the original Warrior frames. Back then GW rarely gave us special weapons on the sprues and instead sold those alternative options in metal blister packs. The current kits (not just the Dark Eldar ones, but all their newer releases) have addressed this to the point were now it seems that you end up with more leftover bitz than you have glued onto the finished models!

Special weapons.

These next pic are of two basic head swaps.

The current heads have ball joints to connect them to their bodies, whereas the older models had a flat connection. I had to cut the ball joint off of course but I was able to cut it in a way so I could angle the heads to be looking in different directions. .

This last model will likely be a Specialist in Kill Team simply because she has one of the newer helmet-less heads and is easier to distinguish from the rest of her companions.

Grit has been applied, primer sprayed and the painting has begun. I look forward to showing you the results.