Eldar Windrider Jetbikes

I have an Eldar (Aeldari) army. Actually, I have three. None of them are fully painted.

To be fair, most of my main army - Craftworld Eldar or Asuryani - is made of metal and I have had more of it painted in the past, but as I got better at painting I decided to strip them back to bare metal with the intention of repainting them. They are still waiting for some attention.

I am also in the process of creating Craftworld-style bases for all my Eldar, and moving them to 32mm bases as I think that looks much better. This has delayed my dream of a fully-painted space-elf army more than a little.

When Games Workshop finally brought out the new plastic Eldar Jetbikes I immediately added two boxes to my collection. After an embarrassingly long time on my "to paint" list, I finally settled on a new colour scheme for my Craftworld and got to work.

I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Here's a brief rundown of how I painted these -

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Most of the work was done by airbrush. To make life easier for myself I didn't glue the riders' heads on or attach the riders to the bikes until after painting. Everything was undercoated Grey (Vallejo Model Air Primer). 

Airbrushing - Blue (riders and bikes) 

I used the following paints in the following order to achieve my Craftworld colour:

• Magic Blue (Vallejo) - basecoat

• Dark Blue (Vallejo) - shading

• Teclis Blue (GW) - highlight #1

• ~2:1 Mix of Teclis Blue (GW) and Wolf Grey (Vallejo) - highlight #2

Airbrushing - Bone (bike pattern and helmets) 

The bone was also airbrushed where possible. The patterns on the bikes were created by masking off the blue and simply spraying over it. I toyed with the highlighting mixture a bit so it came out closer to Ivory in the end.

• Sand (Vallejo) - Basecoat

• ~1:1 Mixture of Sand and Ivory (both Vallejo)  - highlights

The remainder was brushwork and it didn't take all that long. To make the blue sharper I added a wash of ~1:1 Black and Dark Prussia Blue (Vallejo) around details and in crevices, and a highlight of Fenrisian Grey (GW) on prominent edges. I also shaded my airbrushed bone with Seraphim Sepia and Rakarth Flesh (both GW) to tie it better with the bone that wasn't airbrushed (which was basecoated with Rakarth Flesh because that might be my favourite paint ever). The gems are Liche Purple (old GW) highlighted by mixing with Ivory and shaded by mixing with black.

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One drawback to attaching the riders to the bikes after painting - some of the legs scraped paint of the bikes when working them into position. Luckily the damage was minor and easy to repair, but as I have other jetbikes still to paint (Drukhari and Harlequins) I might have to rethink my assembly strategy.

I also noticed something (I thought) was very odd while doing some touch-ups with the airbrush - lighter blues applied much more smoothly over the darker ones than the other way round. This is totally the opposite of what you get when painting with an ordinary brush. With that in mind, in future I'm going to try just airbrushing from dark to light (not middle → shading → highlighting) as I think it could be a time saver and would produce cleaner results.

Until next time, happy painting!