The Archon’s Challenge

Fellow Archons!

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a painting competition in The Dark City so I think it’s high time we set that straight. I am therefore delighted to announce the start of the Archon’s Challenge!

The rules are simple. Post up to 3 pictures of your best work with a paintbrush in this thread. It must be a single model or unit represented by a datasheet in the current Warhammer 40,000 Index: Xenos 1 book and it must have the Drukhari keyword. It can be an off the shelf model, a conversion, kitbash or even scratch built as long as it meets the above criteria. The only other rule is that all painting must be your own work!

The competition runs until the end of August 2017 so you have plenty of time to start an entirely new model if you wish. At the end of that period I will create a poll for you to vote for your favourite entry. The winner will receive praise, accolades, bragging rights and a shiny, new custom title of their choice* which will appear between their name and avatar in all their posts on the forum.

Good luck and may the best Archon win!

*Please note, the title must conform to forum rules so no obscenities allowed etc.

Must have Drukhari, so no harlies or CWE? :-( Oookay. Its hight time to get back to painting DE anyway. :-)

For my submission, I'll be posting Sybarite Tezurar, of the Kabal of the Splintered Keel. He's a regular ole' Sybarite veteran with a long, colorful history in my army. He leads a squad of Kabalites known as 'The Piercing Strike', who fly into realspace raids aboard their favored Raider.









As a note, I may wind up taking some better pictures down the road of him, right now I'm just using my phone and thus, not getting the best quality.

As far as painting goes, I started my scheme a long time ago after settling on the colors black and green, two of my favorites. After painting up about 2,000 points, I bought a new box of Kabalites in 7th edition and wanted to try making my scheme better. Instead of a chaos black base-coat, I used incubi darkness with a Coelia greenshade wash that turned out way better than I expected. Then for highlights I used Kabalite green followed by some Skarsnik green. After realizing how much I loved the new scheme, I stripped my entire 2,000 point army and have since been re-painting them to get them up to this new standard.

But of course I then had to decide on a base.. before I was just using the generic forest texture that GW offers, but didn't quite enjoy the look I was getting. A few years back I made a D-day gaming board for my Cadian army, and decided I needed to make one for all my Eldar as well. At first I drew inspiration from the 2nd Gathering Storm book, and contemplated trying to make a board resembling Commorragh under siege, but the project just felt way too overwhelming. Instead I settled for making an Eldar Exodite world, that could be used for all of my Eldar armies. I looked around online and found a few cool looking jungle river valleys that I liked, and set to work.

The bottom, brown layer of the base is Stirland mud, onto which I then put a messy mixture of herbs (buying $50 of herbs at the local grocery store got me a few weird looks to say the least), which was followed by some PVA to help glue them down, and then a sepia acrylic ink wash to darken it all up and blend it together.

Even then the Kabalites didn't quite seem to fit in. They looked good.. but I thought maybe they needed to look a little dirty, seeing as how they were tromping through the jungle. I'd never toyed with weathering powders or their like before, and thus was really concerned with trying it out on my nicely painted kabalites. But after testing it on a few spare models, I decided the risk was worth the reward and went all in. Rather than spread the dirt everywhere, I figured it should mostly be around their feet, and look like they've been trudging through some swamps and mud that has since dried.

All in all I really liked the result, but still have more work to do on them. But I do certainly hope you guys enjoy!

ok i'll try to get one done soon!

OK, i was up all night rushing to paint and finishing this model  hope you like.

PS: i tried to embed but didnt work.

I'm in!
Will present 1 of 2 Solarites of 7 Scourges i'm currently working on.
Either with Poison Pistol and Agonizer or Blast Pistol/E-Spear, probably the latter.

Count Adhemar wrote:

It must be a single model or unit represented by a datasheet in the current Warhammer 40,000 Index: Xenos 1 book and it must have the Drukhari keyword.

Wait! Does this mean i can enter a whole Scourge Squad?

It does indeed!

Sweet!

Here is my entry, a Scourge squad, The Bearers Of Bad News.

Currently there's a little dispute about who shall be Solarite, the rest stands watching as the two candidates fight it out:


The Solarite:


The challenger:

Hell yeah! I'm not around as much as I'd like to (stupid content-blocker at work so I can't even go on here at lunch), but I'm definitely in

Done and done!

Have you ever stopped to wonder why Harlequins travel in packs? In the darkest nights, they remember they are not the apex predator of these twisted pathways...







Remember the true nature of our Gods, cousin. The craftworlders may have cast him as their God of War, but first and foremost...Khaine is God of Murder.

Hey, I forgot about this! As have almost everybody else it seems...
Here is my contribution.

Wow, didn't noticed this one !
Thanks to @Scrz to make the title glowy glowy
And thanks to the count for the competition organization

I'm not at home so I'll use some pictures taken somewhat recently.

Here's my reaver squad, I've always loved the models. I just wish it'll be easier to convert (looping and stuff *-*)

I've selected a whole group pictures, and then 2 detailed one.


Here's the full gang


I like this picture because we can see most details : the radar, the shoulder tatoo, gems, and the propulsor.


This one is from the original 3 mens squad, and was the arena champion (before been dethroned by the current masked champ !).

I really wanted to add some personality to him, so I invented a little backstory, with some consequences for the miniature : He always loved to ride without a helemt in order to get all the details in a glimpse, and beeing able to look all around.

But one day he had an accident during a raid, and ended up loosing an eye and having a bad scar to the face.
His fellow companions added graffitis to his bike in order to mock him, and maybe demoralize him to get his place.

But he did neither, and those companions will never be able to graffiti or mock anyone. EVER.
(also he still doesn't use a helmet)

Enjoy ^^ and sorry for the late post

Whoa, late to this party! I guess I'll have to paint something for Round 2.

Yeah, I just noticed it too.

But am I missing something, or can we enter something we painted a while back? It doesn't look like you (or I) need to wait for round 2. Right?

Calyptra wrote:

But am I missing something, or can we enter something we painted a while back? It doesn't look like you (or I) need to wait for round 2. Right?

You are correct, newness is optional. Show us what you got!  

Oh.... well then, i will know this for next time lol.

You guys still got 2 days to post.
Show us something you're proud of

Ok! Here's the Haemonculus I painted earlier this year.

I'm thick, how do we vote.

There will be a poll, according to the original post.

Sorry guys, been rather busy but I will get the poll up shortly.

No prob

Poll is now up and can be found here