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I like to really make my
armies as individual and coherent
as possible, and usually spend a few weeks or months
thinking what I want this army to look like.
In preparation for the
Iyanden army
I started by googling
Iyanden images and eldar paint jobs. I played with the idea of making my own
craft world similar enough to use their fluff, but thought
that Iyanden is an odd enough army as it is, and stuck
with them.
I haven’t yet seen an Iyanden
army I really admired and thought I’d tinker with the
'official' colour scheme. The
typical Iyanden army I've found is a bright yellow and
bright blue. Neat, clean, bright. This is
not at all what I invisage for my army. Maybe it was
that clean and polished before the nid invasion but not
now. I imagine the Iyanden of now to be
a semi desolate place,
beginning to fail in small and increasing ways; unable to
fully repair the damage from the Tyranids; a wound beast,
attracting predators; in a state of constant war.
How will this affect my
models? I want a slightly rag-taggle looking army. An
army which looks like it has survived a Tyranid holocaust.
With this in mind I want to achieve a slightly tired look
to the yellow, and will be using brown as the base colour,
rather than the orange that is typically used, and which
gives a less clean end look. I'm opting for purple
as my base coat for blue to add a little more depth to the
colour scheme. Strangely enough those of you who
know my other armies will recognise yellow and purple as
the colours of the Crinan IVth:
but I hope to do a better job this time round.
I’ve also added a fair
amount of damage to the wraithguards. And
I’ve added some rubble and craters to the bases as well, to give the
look of damage.
Converting
My first problem with the
army is with
the similarity of this many figures. At the moment the
un-altered wraithguard figures have the animation of plodding Eldar
Frankensteins. I imagine my wraithguard
more as the reinamited spirits of veteran elder
warriors, the personalities of whom show through in the
figure. I also imagine the equipment
of each is altered in some small ways to reflect the
personality of the elder spirits that animate them. To
represent this I changed a few of the gun ends, and did
some fairly major remodelling - more on that later.
One of the original ideas
was to make the main colour white – which is the Chinese
colour for death – and obviously this went out the window
when I chose to go with Iyanden. But sticking with the
oriental theme I started thinking along the lines of
kamikaze pilots with headbands and strips of calligraphic iconography.
So I’m going to add little banners and strips of writing,
and I also thought I’d add individual calligraphy to each
figure’s tabards – as if their history and/or achievements
have been written on them.
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