The Eldar Avatar of Khaine

Hey everyone ! it's the end of January already but happy new year to all of you, hoping 2024 brings you as much happiness and achievement as you need !

So last year I foolishly let myself embak on a "tale of gamers" kind of challenge focused on 2nd ed 40k. After being tempted by tyranids but realising wi only had like half the points in models, I looked at the obvious choice, chaos, but I only have troops now left to aint so nothig to make a proper list of. 
Then some old friends came and knocked at the door after a 10 years hyatus : the Eldar.
It had been exactly 10 years since I last stripped and reassembled my army !

Seeing this as an omen, I decided to pick the Eldar, they've always been special to me since they were my brother's army to begin with and painting them hasn't always been a pleasure. But I'm 10 years richer in experience, we have plenty of new tools to help us and I have a plan !

The idea will be to use this 1500 points as a starter so I can add units as I want in the future. I'm not going to detail the list as of now (can't reveal everything yet) but it's going to be a very compact, low model count force with all the big units so that I can add the more flavourful ones later, it's a way I like to work for armies and it certainly helped for my chaos and orks.

So obviously, who better than the Avatar of Kaine as my first model ! He's 300pts so 50 ahead of schedule (although I didn't know then it would be a handicap) but he's the central piece of any respectable Eldar army !

I had first started to paint him about 8 years ago but stalled in the early stages because I lost focus for some other projects :

You can see I modified the pose to make him a littlemore aggressive and menacing (and to have my own special version). My intention then was to have a much darker but also brighter colour scheme than the iconic one from Mike McVey, I really wanted to convey the sense of fire so I tried and give different kinds of heat to each section.

The mane is painted like a flame because the sculpt really looks like one anyway, the bunny ears on the helmet are painted like a red hot piece of steel to give it some sense of weight and the armour is meant to look like some cooled bits of rock/metal floating on some lava or something

Building an Eldar army means picking a Craftworld though and although I'm still very found of Ulthwé which was the previous Craftworld these models were painted as, I've decided to pick my own Craftworld so this will be craftworld Amadán ! Colour wise, it will be quite close in tones to Saim Hann but hopefully different enough. It's probably familiar with a twist.

Anyway, I don't have many friends for him to show but next month should see the next entry to the project so keep tuned and check our collective blog to see what others are doing and how utterly bonkers it is !