The Shire and everything after: Syvaneth & Wood Elves

On to my next project. In fact, this is my next-but-one project as I just finished building a Khorne fantasy force. However, the paint I need for it won’t be delivered until Wednesday, so I skipped on to the next cranny of the Lead Mountain.

I picked out a random box to find a bunch of Games Workshop fantasy Age ofSigmar Sylvaneth models that I acquired in the Before Times.

First up there’s a couple of treemen, the bits for which were spread across six partially used sprues. Luckily this time I actually had the build instructions, so it wasn’t a guessing game to put them together. These large figures turned out to be surprisingly delicate but unusually for Games Workshop were straightforward to assemble. Sure, there were parts that were unnecessarily split into lots of little bits, but there wasn’t anything too taxing.

Putting them together from the various sprues I was missing the parts for a lower leg, so I went looking online for replacement bits. I’ve tried to get bits in the past directly from Games Workshop, only to be told that "they don’t do that". Seems like a missed opportunity to me but what do I know?

Anyway, the various “bitz” seller sites don’t seem to have the parts I’m after, and in desperation I even turned to ebay without success.

So…well…its down to a bit of manual sculpting as I’ve not yet jumped into the 3D printing pool. I don’t do much of this and I’m not very good at it but from time to time I do have to sort out some gap filling etc. so… As this was a fairly big part, greenstuff on its own wouldn’t work well. I’m aware that greenstuff can be mixed in with milliput to make a modelling clay that is greater than the sum of its parts, so after a bit of research I threw the two products together in a roughly 60/40 mix (with milliput being the 60%). I’m not sure if I should have mixed the two products independently and then mashed them together, but I just started with the four components and worked them together. It seemed to do the job so I set about moulding a very crude treeman leg. I mixed in some plastic bits to try and spruce it up a bit. Its not great but when painted I think it’ll be fine.

Oh, and I mixed far too much so I made a couple of "logs" for the bases with that was left over.

I found some bits for some wood elf archers, so threw them together with some weird fairy creatures. As I’ll be using this force for OnePage Rules fantasy games, these will do for units with the “warning cry” special ability.

And there’s also a good bunch of branchwraiths which I’ll put together. Seventeen so far, but there’s more to come. Now these things are relatively easy to build, but again could be easier. They pain problem is that their feet are TINY, so there’s very little contact points to attach them to their bases. So that’s a bit of a struggle.

With the figure haul construction completed, I undercoated them in a mix of wraithbone (ivory) and white. The wood elf archers are going to be predominantly shades of green and brown so I did these in a green undercoat.

I have a basic idea of the colour scheme I plan to use for the tree beasties, which is intended to make the painting simple and quick. I'm hoping to get these completed in no more than 4-5 hours.

So I started on one figure with a simple colour test of Games Workshop's Aggaros Dunes contast paint. To give a bit of colour interest I'll also use Plaguebearer Flesh contrast paint to throw a bit of green in there.

I'm happy with the first trial so I'll press ahead.

Ultimately I'll also probably use some other geen washes to mayby highlight the "Celtic" style skin markings on these miniatures, and maybe hint at internal energy glows. Maybe some Waywatchers Green, or some yellow glazes? Not sure yet.
I also need to decide what colour to do the little faerie creatures hitching a ride on the dryads. GW's "box art" has the Sylvaneth contrasting colour as a sort of ice blue, and blue sits very well next to brown. However, I'm thinking that I want to keep the army with a limited palette of green and brown, so maybe I'll do them in a bright "glowing" green?

Typically this is how non-historical projects will develop for me. I'll have a broad view of what colours I want, but that palette will change and evolve as I proceed.

UPDATE

After a couple of hours work of an evening, I have the dryads finished. Using Aggaros Dunes this was super quick and simple to do.

To give a bit of visual interest I also used Plaguebearers Flesh to give a subtle green hint on the "loincloth" that each model sort of has, as well as on the hands and other twig-like extremities.

I used Waywatchers Green glaze on the faces, and a light drybrush of Ushabti bone on the obvious skulls, bones, etc. I used Tesserach Glow technical paint on the fairies.

Finally I applied my simple base cover (a mix of coarse and fine sand with some grey rocks, and then dabs of static grass).

I'm not sure I entirely like the finished product, but wood is always difficult to paint. We think that natural wood is brown, but it almost always isn't, so translating that onto a model in a satisfactory hue is trick at best. When the whole model is wood(!) it's even harder. But stepping back from the pseudo-artistic anguish, the wargamer "slapdash" approach says "that'll do".

With these little fairies i just gave them a wash of Tesserach Glow and called it done!
In OPR there's a special ability called "warning cry" that is usually
skinned as a watchful pet. I'll use these as markers for that I think.

Next up will be the treemen, which i'll finish in a similar palette using similar methods.

I also dug out a small collection of very old wood elf figures. These are a mix of bad early-GW (1995?) plastic monopose archers (which I'll probably bin), and some nice metal miniatures from 1993, mostly archers, war dancers, and spearmen. These look like Jez Goodwin sculpts which is always nice! The plastic horses are missing tails so I may dump them and replace them with some modern plastic ones from Victrix. I have a bunch of Napoleonics left over from my Turnip28 armies, so they'll do. But I'm not sure yet what I'll do with these. I still have the four more modern plastic archers to paint. I know I want a green and brown colour scheme on them so these older metal models will most likely get the same treatment.

Bent and damaged but unbowed! The tailless horses will need replacing though...

A treasure trove of antiques! Not all of these will get used I think.

UPDATE 2

The treemen are done. Interestingly I'm not sure the scheme and painting techniques worked as well on these bigger figures than on the smaller dryads, but they're done and table ready so, "much success".