Rogue Quest level Eleven - The exodite ranger

So this is it. The end of the first part of the Rogue Quest for me ! I'm reaching the 6th model and today's entry is the ranger ! 

The ranger is an essential class to my eyes in any good dungeoneering party and to represent that class I had plenty of opportunities. The 40k universe has plenty of scouts of all kinds and Jes Goodwin has sculpted some excellent eldar scouts. Of course eldars are a must as rangers as the ranger class is usually one favoured by wood elves. But if I had to choose an equivalent for wood elves in 40k, it would undoubtedly have to be an exodite...

Good thing is I just happened to have a model looking like an exodite scout and commissioned by no other than Axiom with whom I happen to share this Rogue Quest project ! The opportunity was too good to ignore.

The model is really nice and was sculpted by Patrick Keith (or Kirsten Dunst, don't know, always tend to mix those 2...). I had to slightly alter the model to adapt it to what I wanted though.

Design sketch by Axiom

For some reason I had decided I wanted the model to represent a female eldar. Just because. The pose was not spectacularly feminine and no real physical trait helped. That wasn't a problem though.

Like many of you, I knew thanks to Fury Road that a woman can look good and tough without having to show her breasts or anything and that's where I wanted to to take that model.

If you've never seen that film, do yourself a favour and do watch it. Really.

Only problem is that painting half her face black while her face mask was already hiding a good part of the face would have made her look weird. So with the help from my WIPster friends (including Jon/Axiom) we came up with a solution that would hopefully make the ranger a little more feminine.

Punk influence is always a good thing to add for Rogue Trader models so I was quite pleased with the  idea my friends had come up with.  A little putty pushing and here we were :

In hindsight, I should have shaved the other side of her head instead, that would have been a little better. The idea was also to give her tattoos on the shaved part of the head but as I kept painting the model I felt that it would only make her too busy (plus the space was relatively small to add anything).

Colours wise, I kept a colour scheme close to Furiosa's with bandages and brownish fabric but to give her some more flavour I gave her a nice pink scarf around the waist and pink hair too. I imagine the scarf is a link to the people she has left behind on her homeworld (for mysterious reason you can be sure) and while I was at it I applied a little OSL to tie her to the other members (along with the red-orange gems on the rifle).

I quite like that her rifle doesn't look like made on a craftworld, it gives another style to her.

You'll note her skin is very pale to enhance the fact she's another gender and race (adding a little more ethnic variety to the group).

All in all, I'm quite pleased with this last model and the finished group seems fine to me. None of those models (apart from the fighter maybe) would have been painted so soon if it wasn't for that project and now it's fueled me with loads of ideas for terrain and scenery so I hope that 2016 will give  us some good games with those and the monsters I'll throw at them !

Here's a group shot of the 6 models completed with the links to each entry if you want to check any of the others.

Paladin, Druid, Ranger, Fighter, Wizard and Barbarian

Next and last Rogue Quest entry by Axiom next week !