The Brotherhood of the Bright Blades - Charles Rampant's High Elves

Hey all, 

My name is Charles, and this year I made the move from my beloved (though useless) Tomb Kings into a High Elf army. Rich has invited me to make a blog post, showing off my progress on my army to date, and talking about my thoughts and techniques along the way. I decided for this, rather than a simple presentation of the army, to talk about the path that led me to paint them the way that I did.

Let’s begin by talking about my background. I did the Warhams when I was a kid, and then did the usual “turn 18, panic about girls, sell Warhammer” thing that so many of us do. Then back when I was in first year of University, back in 2010 or so, I found myself slowly drawn back in. First it was Bloodbowl. Then Battlefleet Gothic… and before I knew it, I had some Orks. Then a lot of Orks. So, so many Orks. 

I went through a Space Marine army as well. My painting style, through all of these armies, was one that emphasised clean lines and neatness, with over the top highlighting as standard. 

When I started playing Warhammer Fantasy (aka The Great Game), I very cheaply acquired a lot of Tomb King models, sold to me by players who manifestly couldn’t handle the book’s sheer awfulness. This army had much less complicated painting than my Orks, focusing on drybrushing for many elements, but I kept the heavy metal highlights as I wanted to give it a bronze age feel of spears glinting in the sunlight. (Though spears on skeletons is a terrible choice, so I naturally sold those models on.)

I kept expanding this army, with many of the constructs finding their way in, but I never really won all that many games. I took two Best General in Race prizes with them, and generally had a lot of fun with them, but their rules just drove me insane. I keep getting asked whether I will return to them, now that the Undead Legions rules are available, so perhaps their time will come again.

So this brings us onto the High Elves, the ostensible point of this tract! A friend was kind enough to simply give me the Island of Blood models, which would form the core of my collection. When I set out to start painting them, I first stopped and did some colour theory. Now, explaining the ins and outs of colour theory is a bit beyond the scope of this work, but there is a very good series of articles on it over on this other blog: http://theback40k.blogspot.co.uk/p/color-theory-archive.html .

After reading up on colour theory and comparing it to my models, I had identified an issue with my Tomb Kings: the colours I used were actually a fairly poor choice. In short, the purple didn't provide enough of a contrast with the overall orange/yellow colouring of the models to really make it stand out. So with the High Elves, I decided from the get go that my colours would be ones that would make a solid overall impression. I would use red as my primary, most important colour in the army. When people looked at it, they would see red. I chose orange as the colour that would accompany the red, would be the next colour in the overall effect: in colour theory terms, it is a harmonious colour with red, so they would look natural together. To provide the contrast colour, and give me colours to break up the red and the orange, I would use blue, in a wide variety of hues and saturations: silvery metal, bright blue gems, white cloth. All of these correspond to a blue, especially with the correct base colours. Things like skin and wood don’t stand out to our eyes – they look ‘normal’ and so are ignored – but these colour choices would define the overall look of the army. 

I decided to be particularly daring, and actually use red on the weapons of my models. Instead of holding aloft silver swords, these two Swordmasters – my first test models – hold red ones. This is both fairly surprising to the eye, which is expecting some kind of a metal, and also visually striking from a distance. The intention was to impress viewers who were standing 3 feet above the models. But it wasn't quite striking enough for my taste, not just yet; the finishing touch was when I (upon a friend’s recommendation) added some orange to the tip of the weapon.

Here we see the overall effect of my theorycrafting. We also see why you shouldn't use a gas hob to straighten bent swords! Orange has become the dominant colour instead of red, which is used only on the most impressive part of the model. Here you see red gems, which I later changed to blue in the service of providing more contrast to the gold that always surrounds the gems on my models. White and silver, both painted in ways that don’t distract away from the bright red and oranges, round out the overall look. With the theory satisfied, and some test models completed and approved by my clubmates, I started the slow road of painting the army. 

Thanks for reading this blog post, and next time we will be looking at how I progressed from the simple Swordmasters onto more complex units such as the Dragon Princes, Seaguard and Griffon. You can find me on Twitter, using the handle @Charlesrampant. Until next time!