Reavers of the Obsidian Rose (Part 1)

Expanding on my Dark Eldar force, it seemed fitting to move onto the Reavers. These are the Reavers from the 1998 line of Dark Eldar, of which I have ten models that need to be assembled. I have never built any of these before, so you are about to witness my first encounters with this kit.

These two mint in box models were won on ebay for less than their original SRP!

For being 20 years old now, I am impressed with how well these seem to hold up! They are multi-part and (mostly) snap-fit. The pic below shows the model assembled with pretty much no glue.

Snapped together for a preview.

Naturally, I glued it anyway. However I stalled shy of assembling the rear bladevines and gun mount. I like the sleekness of this model, but the extra junk hanging off of it betrays the aerodynamic nature of it's design and bulks it up. Also, the blades surrounding the driver seem senselessly dangerous for him. Granted, these are insane and cruel sadomasochists with a surprising lack of self-worth, but I don't think that they are stupid either. But I will return to those thoughts in a moment...

One thing I want to address right away are the stupid looking heads on these things. They have not aged well in the past 20 years, but to be fair, they looked stupid even then. The heads look like a cross between a gimp and a Foot Clan Ninja (TMNT reference). In fact, too much of the '98 Dark Eldar release seems overly inspired by the Shredder and his minions for it to be a coincidence. I mean really, right down to the color schemes! Well, I am not sticking with that idea, and decided to do what I did with my Kabalite Warriors and swap their heads out with spare heads from the current kits.

Head swap! 

It worked out well. You just have to size up the new head against the old head and, with an xacto blade, reform the neck by cutting and shaving off the ball joint at the base of the new one, until you have a conforming neck. So far it has worked out well.

Base coat started.

I started the painting by basecoating the main body of the bike in Khorne Red, leaving most of the black base color exposed. This will follow the steps laid out in Venom Part-2.  The flesh tones will follow the steps laid out in the Raiders of Commorragh book starting with Cadian Flesh as a base. I think this wearing-a-thong-while-riding a-superfast-bike idea is hilarious. Twisted, but hilarious.

Cadian Flesh in areas no Cadian model has flesh exposed.

Back to the weird gun mounts: I just have to customize these bikes in this regard. Looking at the orignal Codex: Dark Eldar from '98 it would appear that the 'eavy Metal team felt the same. In the pic below taken from that book you can see that no two Reaver Bikes are alike, and l like that concept of individuality.
(And bonus points on the adobe Ork buildings!)

Original Reavers from Codex: Dark Eldar '98. *

Justifed, and emboldened, I set about performing my own customizations. I turned the main body sideways on this one, and trimmed down the gun mount to get it to fit on the bottom. I angled the gun slightly downward to imply that it might be straffing ground targets.

Reaver #2.

On this one I ditched the upper Bladevanes and worked the mounting arm directly behind the rider. I like that it sort of recalls, in a slight gestalt way, the original design silhouette of the Talos Pain Engine; specifically the scorpion tail gun mount. Also, it ammuses me that the blade under the gun is so scary close to the pilot's head. I think I might paint on some cuts to his head... dare to be stupid, yes?

Reaver #1. 

These are coming along well so far. Let's see where this goes next in Part 2...



*Image used without permission. (C) Games Workshop LTD. Image used not as a challenge to copyright but for the purposes of revuew and reference.