For those who just want the pics, there they are. The rest of the post is explanation on how I went from primed to finished model.
First, we laid out the color scheme... while this may not be "traditional" Dark Eldar colors, it matches my Client's army and that was the most important part when it all came down to it in the end. It's no good if I paint a great model, but it doesn't match his army.
With the major colors picked out, we came to the freehand on the back of the cape. My Client sent me an image he wanted and I did my best to reproduce that on the entire back of the model.
It came out much better than I anticipated it would. I was quite pleased with the end result and was worried that I would lose the blending and shading on the cape to all the detail in the image. It was a bit of a challenge to combine the two aspects and still make it believable.
We toyed with adding freehand to the front inside of the cloak but left it off in the end as I could not come up with anything that wasn't more "Imperial looking" than anything else. I didn't want to detract from the model by adding the wrong design just because I wanted to have something there. In the end, I think leaving the front inside blank was best as it keeps it clean looking.
The base was designed to look like a partially destroyed Slaanesh temple (note the symbol on the base) that these guys had just rampaged. The blood is a nice touch my Client came up with and I think it's a bit of character to the model overall. It's my first time adding "blood" splatters, so I was careful to not overdo it. It had to look gruesome, but not be over the top silly looking.
The base is painted light grey and then a series of thinned down washes of different colors with some thin lines give it the marble look.
The metal areas on the model started out being done with NNM. That was quickly scratched in favor of a more traditional approach that could be modified by adding washes to create more contrast. The trouble with using NMM on this guy was it looked to much like his cape in the end (due to the colors and blending) and it was more confusing than it was helpful. NMM might be cool, but it's not always the best technique to use.
And these pictures might give you a better idea of the contrast on the model, he's not as dark as the top pictures make him out to be.
My Project Link: Dark Eldar Archon conversion
