Dark Moon Kabal

I got several armies anyway, but it's a collection made over 16 years, I earned very good money. It's easier to collect 40k when you got a good job :p.

I started when I was 12, when I got some x mas money, a small job, I invested it all in 40k.

I see you've been busy!

Khera, now that is a nice addition your army. Good stuff, keep it coming!

Ok guys! I'm back !

Not that I didn't do anything in the last couple of months, I'm just more active on FaceBook (https://www.facebook.com/DarkMoonKabal, more regular updates then here)


You'll get all the updates in one big post.

So  a new dex came out and I was pretty busy .

I bought all the white dwarves, some good stuff, good articles, enjoyed the pages on the Voidraven particularly.





I bought the supplement too, no way I was going to miss it, awesome rules, awesome fluff.



The Coven supplement made it possible to field all these models in normal non apoc battles suddenly, pure awesomeness:



Also got the silly cards, stupuid, but still cheap, had to have em.








The codex and supplement and whole releases did get me distracted, but I still got some stuff done in the meantime.

Venoms got done, minus the top cannon and the passengers, on the top do list.



Also the second Razorwing got done in the meantime:
BTW yeah I'm extremely happy it moved to Fast Attack, as fast as I'm concerned, it's THE best FA we have now by far.












Theses 3 didn't take that long to do, the Venoms in particular were done quite fast compared to the next in line; the Raiders. These took forever to do, and not even with passengers, gunners & pilots, all on the to do list.







The 2 brothers together:




The new releases also cought my Eye and my Wallet paid the price.

Enter the WIP of the Voidraven currently my only focus, slow but sure progress.

It all started with the parts:



It's not just a scratch build type of double razorwing, the parts have a lot of minor differences with Razorwing, different blades, different wings, the interior of the pilot seats are different, different canopies, different missiles, plenty of differences in other words, it's quite larger too and the Signature Void mine and the whole front clearly sets it apart from it's smaller brother.
Lately the Razorwing got smaller in my mind for some reason, they feel so tiny, even if they're not that small either.

For all those wondering how much bigger is the Voidraven compared to a razorwing: here's the comparison:



After it was assembled and ready to be primed it looked like this:



The missile pods will be glued, but the 2 parts are magnetised to fit in the tips of the missiles:
I can leave them empty or I can put any missiles I want.
BTW I didn't glue or magnetise the guns either, I think they fit in just fine.



The big boy got primed and everything and I started painting it.



I made a custom base, from some kind of plastic, took forever to cut, but I'd say it was really worth it.



I wanted it to be Higher than the razorwings, clearly setting it apart as the big boy. It had the same Commorraghian theme as the other base I had made



Same technique was used, same theme.




Not that much done yet, I havn't had much time to work on it, I do work on the parts when I can



The mins got done completely:



Currently working on the canopies, BTW extremely hard to do, very troublesome, had to be very careful, crazy freehand.
I used an old hairless brush to carefully remove any mistakes, by rubbing gently on the surface.



I finished painting the interior, one of the hardest things I ever had to do, had to look at the front, had to look very carefully and paint these really small details while doing a clean paintjob, right now I was doing the highlights on these canopies, also doing the highlights on the Missile pods.

I'll continue working on this Bomber till it's finished, it will be entered in a painting contest and it will be displayed at my Local GW later on.



I also prepared my last 5 bikes to be painted afterwards, a second squad of current range kabalites and I also want to paint my Mandrakes, Reavers and mandrakes become a lot better with the current rules, I sincerely want to see them painted. I also think I'll take my time to finish the last 6 wyches and Lelith Probably.

The Next priority however are all the Raider & venom passengers, all 21 of them:





I'll post my Voidraven when it's done, but If you want more regular updates follow me on FB

https://www.facebook.com/DarkMoonKabal

Man those models look awesome, especially the sails on the raiders, no wonder they took a while to do!

Wow that is some serious painting you have been doing. They all look fantastic. I especially like the razorwings. The line highlighting ect is really effective on them.

I feel your pain about the crew. I only have four to do and it is giving me pain just to think abiut it, i cant begin to imagine what having 24 would feel like!

Thx for the compliments guys, yeah all the time I spend on these 7 vehicles was worth it, I'm looking forward to seeing my Voidraven added to the bunch.

Yeah the Passengers add a lot of extra work, but they're the cherry on the top of the cake, I think they add a lot of coolness to the models, such useless extra details that contribute greatly to the models.

That razorwing line work is unreal. As is this entire log, I might add.

I love the base for your Voidraven bomber. Very impressive army all round!

Wow and just Wow your collection is epic!!!

Some progress on the Voidraven, I'll try my best to finish it before the 24th.

The hull and the freehand after are the only things left to do, everything else is done.







Pretty much need to start the endless highlights.

Voidraven Tutorial

Step 0: just black, still crucial



Step 1: Midnight blue



Step 2: Liche purple on the edges



Step 3: first basic highlights with Genestealer purple, thin lines



Step 4: final highlights, on the outer edges (dechala Lilac edge paint, or mix of 90% white, 5% purple, 5% light blue)



Step 4.1: freehand (used Scaly green mixed with a littte white to make it lighter.



4.15



Step 4.2 finishing!



Hope this wil help some

A different format for the same tutorial
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1556114317937569.1073741875.1406358382913164&type=3

and now the pictures of the amazing Voidraven Bomber, paintjob due to me, but the model itself is just so amazing, my favorite GW model no joke

































and now accorpanied with his lil brothers









Size comparison with other DE vehicles:




Those who want to see random WIPs and comments on the Voidraven:

https://www.facebook.com/DarkMoonKabal

duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude

Absolutley nasty stuff Khain. Dark Eldar in purple is a classic that'll never die. Really superb execution... the ice blue freehand is excellent as well. Wonderful detailing on the cockpit as well... this legendary army only continues to grow!

I really like your tutorial! It is nice to see, how just a few colours can make such a nice looking model ;-) great work!

That freehand though

Really, really stunning paint job. It looks fantastic!

My mind boggles at all the line highlighting though

Lord_Alino wrote:

That freehand though

It is, indeed, awesome. Do you sketch the shapes before starting, or just go for it?

Holy sH*t...this is amazing! Really love the hard highlighting and the freehand is ace as well!
Keep up the good work (for the sake of all of us )

Cheers
Caspaar

Thx for the compliments guys, I was already inspired to paint already, but all these positive vibes get me going even harder.

Plastikente wrote:

Lord_Alino wrote:

That freehand though

It is, indeed, awesome.  Do you sketch the shapes before starting, or just go for it?

Yeah I looked through the codices, white dwarfs, look at the boxes, I've sketched up most of the symbols and freehand used on the GW models, all to get a good feeling on what to do, I need to know what type of freehand style to use. I copied some things, invented some of my own.

Some of the parts of the flyer/skimmer I drew on paper then did some freehand on it in pencil, however most of the freehand I've done, I did on feeling. Before starting I do decide one clear thing: where I'm going to put some freehand, then I make a type of mental image in my head. I knew what type of freehand I was going to do on the Voidraven from the first day I bought it, I knew I wanted some on the wings, some around the cockpit and one big freehand piece over the entire bomber.
I've got a good idea for the second and third Voidravens too (on the to buy list), got the mental images in my head for the time being.

As for the other freehand I did, either I copied something similar of the GW stuff or I improvised on the vehicle itself, doing whatever felt good, though I always knew exactly where I'll put some freehand, I always pick places where, just don't always know what I'll put on it.

The first layer of the freehand in the darker turquoise was exactly to draw the basic freehand, I started with the outer layers, then filled in. The Light turquoise is only the real color, I don't need to think, I just fill, it's done a lot faster than the first step.

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This year was an excellent 40k year, got a lot painted up, very productive year!

Plans for next year:

Still have to paint all the pilots, gunners, passengers of course.

Summary of the rest I plan to paint:
-4 old raiders
-5 old ravagers
-3 old ravagers
-5 current Reavers
-5 mandrakes
-20 current Kabalites with special weapons, etc...
-30 old warriors with special weapons.
-6 last Wyches I have yet to paint
-Lelith
-an old Succubus
-a couple of Old wyches
-Superheavy skimmers (I want to get at least 1 painted up)
-new units should be added up as I buy them
-FW Tantalus & Reaper should be added, high priority buys, I'm 99% sure I'll finally get some in 2015

The Kabalites, some of the Raiders, some of the Ravagers will be done in the current color sheme. I'm sure they'll blend in very well with the current range. This will be the start of a blending campaign, which I will expand later on, truly mixing up old and new range minis.

Some minis I'm painting just purely for fun, but I do want to see the vehicles painted up, especially the Ravagers. With the Ravagers painted up, I'll finally have the right units to play a fully painted effective apoc force. For the record, I already got over half of my vehicles painted, I want to get the % of painted vehicles up higher, Apoc is all about vehicles anyway. I'd be nice to have all the 12 Ravagers painted up this next year.

I want to paint some old skimmers so badly now, I miss painting them pretty badly.





Hopefully 2015 will be as good as 2014.

Wow Khain sounds like you've got an excellent plan for 2015. I too am making a push for a truly effective (and fully painted) Apoc force. Have you played an Apoc game with your Kabal, if so how did it fair? Outside of Skari I've not seen or heard to much about Dark Eldar in the big games... Let me know because I'm fascinated what your experience was being such a dedicated collector and hobbyist.

Only got experience in apoc from back in the 5th, dark eldar did really good back then. No superheavies yeah it's a problem, no doubt (I do have 3 scratch build ones), but the sheer number of the DLs and the sheer number of flyers are pretty effective. Hate to admit it, but DE in apoc behave very orcish, huge numbers to overwhelm the enemy. frankly pure numbers did the trick. Cheap skimmers in apoc, yeah our skimmers are fragile, but they're also cheap, you can field a lot more of them.


The apoc formations make the difference. You have 3 sources for the apoc formations: the GW apoc book, the IA apoc book, Valedor warzone book (+ white dwarf Valedor formation)


The ravager titan hunters Formation , extra survivability + a special weapon that allows you to ignore shields of a titan lol, it's a huge deal, 15 DL shots ignoring the shields.

deploy always from reserves only, deep strike somewhere safe thne shoot away!

The White dwarf exclusive formation basically allowed you to count several skimmers in formations as flyers on turn 1

(Both the above were the main apoc formations back in the 5th)

There's a formation that gives AA on all the skimmers & passengers within the formation

Another formation gives you a permanent inpenetrable WWP that's big enough to deploy vehicles (& superheavies in theory) Good to put a good access point for your reserves without deep strike.

The Coven supplement gave us some useful formations for apoc too, 5 talos with flank attack, pretty useful in apoc, grotesquerie deployed through deep strike (wwp) , same for the Talos + cronos + Heamonculus, deploy through deep strike.
5 talos managing to get into cc with a titan = bye bye titan. Not all titans can fly around like the eldar ones, the imperials are screwed frankly well deployed, not even the eldar titans could get completely out of range of the talos.

All skimmers have deep strike now for free, you can shoot after a deep strike, meaning shooty units in raiders are quite good in apoc. Trueborn with blasters dropping down in a raider, pretty nice firepower.

Don't cluster up units in apoc, to avoid the big apoc D strenghth blasts.

You truly notice the speed & mobility of the dark eldar in apoc, they move crazy fast lol, it's a real advantage as you can gang up on on a portion of the enemy army, before he can get to you.

Back in the 5th you had the Raven Murder Squadron, a FW raven formation composed of 3+ ravens, which you could deploy on turn 1, basically giving you access to deploy nothing but the flyers on turn 1 lol, considering even back then I had 8 flyers, no way they would be shot down.

Right now, I'd imagine you need to put enough on the table to try to survive getting tabled on turn 1, relying on blocked LOS and being out of range to survive mostly, hoping for your units to come in fast on turn 2 & turn 3, that's when you should make the difference. The razorwing spam should be fun to watch, shoot tons of missiles into clusters of enemies lol.

I have 11 flyers, 7 talos, 12 ravagers, tons of raiders, plenty of blasters, DLs and other fun stuff.
Though I don't have superheavy D S weapons, I can field a huge number of Dark Matter shots.

The only thing we lost from before are haywire wyches deployed from a deep strike raider, basically meaning you should keep wyches at home for apoc battles frankly.

I have about 10 heamconuli, and many other HQs, basically a lot of possible no scatter wwps, to get units where I want.

eventually you could use some eldar allies for turn 1 to not get tabled. I got eldar too, so in apoc I could use my eldar skimmer with a couple of good units, but it's not a must, during turn one you're usually not in range of most of his force, meaning you don't per se need these allies. Considering the mobility of the dark kin, you can go very aggresive in an apoc battle. I have tons of cheap warriors for the enemy to have fun with on turn 1, 0 frak given if they get massacred, as long as some remain alive I'm good, more importantly, if the DL & blaster carriers remain alive it doesn't matter if the unit gets nearly wiped out.

If you got more questions or stuff you want to discuss, you can always continue this conversation in PM cavalier.

I can start doing some serious apoc games in a year or 2 when I have nearly all skimmers painted and a nice ground force to back them up. I could play smaller games now too eventually, currently I don't really have apoc players I know, I lost them over the years, that's the true reason why I quit playing apoc battles.

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The current meta actually plays a lot like apoc, we're not limited by FOCs anymore, we can spam skimmers, spam talos now. Now you can field 15-20 raiders no prob, or field 7 talos, before it was only possible in apoc. The 7th changed so much.

Painted units 31/12/2014







I made smaller stems for my flyers, but I still have the taller ones. I'll use the smaller ones for normal games & the taller ones for apoc. I count the Raven as Razorwings & the FW razorwings count as Voidravens till FW decides to give the Ravens decent rules.




I haven't been actively working on my 40k stuff this year, but I did get my mandrakes painted a couple of weeks ago.









I also bought the new harlequin codex & I bought a solitaire, I still got all my old harlequins to paint, I started working on my harlequins, preparing to paint at least 2 formations: A cast of players & The Heroe's Path. I'll expand the army later this year, it's pointless to buy minis now, I know I won't be painting them any time soon anyway. I'll paint the infantry now and buy & paint the Sky/Star/Void weavers later this year.







Harlequins will take forever to paint, and I also still have those raider passengers to do, I have my old ravagers & old raiders I want to get done in the new sheme, so much to paint, so little time.

The Harlequin really bugged me (and also made me stop painting, as I starting reading), suddenly they became a proper army and now I sadly have to admit I have an entire unpainted army T T.
They changed my plans greatly. This year I need to get at least some Harlequins painted up.

BTW I decided to Slowly Start painting some of my Craftworld units, from time to time, I'll get some painted up, first in line I got in mind are Scorpions. I recently got my hands on some metal current edition scorpions and I really want to paint them.

What a collection!!

Dont know if anyone else has mentioned but is it just me or am I the only guy that really likes the old Raiders (maybe even more that the new ones!). The new ones are gorgeous dont get me wrong, but the older ones were so... menacing!

Hey Khaine sorry I missed your reply to me way back in December that was a great read. I've got Valedor too and those formations are all really awesome (though the Eldar ones were the showstopper for me the Revenant Gemini Squadron and Hemlock Mindstorm Squadron are INSANE).

The Mandrakes look awesome BTW... are you actually gonna play them?