Eldar Wraithlord - Project Log - Part 1 - Building

A handsome fellow. Or possibly lady.

Before I start shilling my ebay wares, I thought it would be nice to share some figures I painted pre-blog.

I was lucky enough to get this model very cheaply from ebay. It had been assembled very clumsily and there were some damaged parts, but I thought "how bad can it be".

It was very bad.

So bad that I clipped it to bits, stripped all the paints, and ordered a few spares off bitzbox for the unsalvageable parts.

Genuinely an improvement.

Now, I like the Wraithlord model very much. It's probably the best expression of the Eldar aesthetic of clean, swoopy lines and minimal greebliness. Unfortunately there's not a lot of choice in how you pose them out of the box, and they tend to look rather static.

"Do you mind if I come in? I'd like to talk to you about my sword."

By the background Wraithlords are gigantic constructs animated by the spirit of a departed space-elf. I wanted a pose where it was moving like a person, rather than a whirring robo-man.

So I could re-pose the limbs I sliced through them at the joints and pinned them back together. This had the handy side effect of removing all the weirdly low-tech ribbed material between the joints. I also pinned the right wrist to allow for a more relaxed angle.

The only clever piece of conversion work - well, clever by my standards - was building the left hand grip for the gun. Unfortunately the kit only includes a right handed pistol grip. So I bodged a left handed one together by butchering the closed left fist and adding parts of the right-handed grip.

The trigger and finger are the original flipped upside down and filed to the right shape. Quite proud of that.

I'll spare you the pictures of all the filling I had to do to make it look approximately complete. But here's what it looked like assembled and primed.

None more Grimdark.

Part 2, concerning painting, is here.