Looking for painting inspiration?

Wow.  I just stumbled onto this site and am floored by the quality of models here.  It has all the golden demon winners from around the world with photos of their paint jobs.  Wow.  http://demonwinner.free.fr  It is worth some time checking it out. 

Dark Eldar Scourge Conversion and my Son's painting

 Here are my first attempt at some scourge conversions.  I finally found a head that I like.  As you can see, it is a Kroot head, with the mandible removed.  I liked the bat wings because a)I had 10 un-built gargoyles, and b)they looked cool.  I will fill in the neck with greenstuff before too long.

I may need to fix the pose on this one.  You can see wych arm, kroot upper head, sawed-off splinter rifle=shard carbine with kroot shoulder sling.

 

I like this one with the kroot legs as well. He is holding a heat lance which you can tell is a sawed-off splinter cannon with a dental mixing tip on the end.  Needs magnets.

 Here are some head variations I went through before deciding on the final one.  You can see the dark eldar with the spines-looks too indian.  The greenstuffed beak would be great if I was looking to make Donald Duck. You can also see a good top view of my son's angels sanguine marine.

I wanted to have bird men with faces like that in the codex.  By removing the lower half of the head of the kroot, it made for a lot smaller head that fit with the size of the dark eldar.  I also wanted to make the squad in various stages of augmentation.  I thought I would have a few with kroot/birdman legs, a lot with bird heads, maybe some dark eldar heads with kroot spines coming out the back, or a helmet with spines breaking through the back.  I also want to add some adrenaline injectors in the shoulders like in the fluff and drawings in the codex.  I am also going to magnetize the gun variants to be able to swap them out as I see fit, or as they change the rules and make certain guns less effective.

 And here are a couple of my 11 year-old son's paint jobs on his angels sanguine army.  I think he did great.  He painted, assembled, and based them all by himself.

My Theories on the next Dark Eldar Release

Like most other Dark Eldar lovers, I am anxiously awaiting pictures of the new models.  I know they will be great, but am still wondering what they will look like.  After reading the White Dwarf covering the initial release, I realized that the artists for the codex pictures WERE GIVEN EXAMPLES OF MODELS to base their pictures on.  It wasn't like, "a warp beast has this description, go crazy on what it looks like in your drawings, we'll make models later."  It was more like, "Here are our models for _______ (insert model name here), please draw cool battle pictures depicting these models."

If you look at all the drawings of warp beasts, beast masters, mandrakes, reavers, wyches, incubi, warriors, succubi, etc. etc.  they match the models EXACTLY.  So you want to know what a venom is going to look like?  Check the drawing.  Grotesque?  He is there.  Wrack?  He is in the codex.  Also every drawing depicting grotesques has them looking the same. 

The latest pictures that come out look like a Grotesque head, and maybe the forearm armor of a talos pain engine.  If you look at the drawing of the talos in the codex, it has a lobster-like armored forearm covered with small little spikes. 

The only unknowns are lady malys, asbrudel vect, duke sliscus, and the voidraven.  We have a shot of the razorwing and all the other models that are still to be released. 

Just my 2 Cents.  Let me know what you think they will look like if I am wrong.  I will bet you a squad of mandrakes that I am not.

Dark Eldar Incubus Test and Finished Trueborn Squad

This dark eldar army is painting itself.  I have the incubi 90% done, and the trueborn squad is almost done as well.  Whenever I take pictures I see a lot of little finishing things I need to do.  Here is the incubus.

I think my favorite parts of the paint job is the sword, and the bone colored head.  The sword blade I painted boltgun metal, washed with devlan mud, and then did fine little stripes with mithril silver.  I did the same thing with the giant razor blades on his back.  The head I painted tallarn flesh, washed with devlan mud, drybrushed with bleached bone, washed with gryphon sepia, and final highlighted with skull white.  The horns were the same colors, but I took the sepia wash to the top of the horn, and then a devlan mud wash only about half way up.

The Trueborn squad looks good together.  I really like the bronze with the silver black and red.  It really makes the squad stand out as elites.  I still have a little bit of finishing work to do.

The Dracon's arms are magnetized as is the backpack.  After much deliberation, I decided to go with a blue/purple skin for the dark eldar.  I like the darker skin like fantasy dark eldar.  It makes them look sinister and alien.

Should I paint some skulls on some of these helmets like the halo reach guy?  I am tempted to paint a couple that way.  What do you all think?