These are twelve of the twenty four archers you get in a wood elf battalion box. They’re from a second hand battalion box that was purchased so long ago I’ve forgotten. The box was pretty much as new except that all the sprues had been spray painted matt black. I prefer to clean and assemble the minatures before spraying them and this was a good reminder as to why. The mould lines were sprayed over making them difficult to see. The parts of the model that needed to be glued were covered in paint making them poor surfaces to fix and thus needed to be scraped. The minatures still needed to be clipped from the sprues and then cleaned up. All of which meant that most of the paint needed to be scraped off.
Anyway painted the cavalry and the dryads a long time ago (see previous blog posts). I was going to do all twenty four but just couldn’t bring myself to bite off so many and ended up doing only half of them. My own colour scheme, not totally convinced by it which is why I almost always follow Games Workshop colour scheme. They do rank up a little better than they are in the picture although I’ve had to number them because they do rank up only one way.
I like the colour scheme. Nice job of the faces and the lips especially. I would have loved to hear that you did a full 24. However let us be happy as the box from GW would probably only contain ten nowdays not 24. Nice to see the variation in the bow colours too. I’m currently painting a batch of 30 orcs including 24 orc archers. So your progress here is much akin to what I’m working on.
The whole ranking problem was caused by a demand for more different poses. Which as you see we have all learnt that you can’t realistically rank up different poses in traditional WHF army easily. In the old days when there was only three poses of similar stance it worked fine.. e.g Bretonian archers. (Still the epitome of a ranked archer figure set in my mind)
So isn’t interesting that Age of Sigmar is now a skirmish set up which allows for the full use of the new multi pose hyper detailed plastic figures… almost makes sense now eh?
Yeah if I’d done all 24 I may have realised I needed to be able to fit in the standard bearer and the musician into the front rank. Not sure how that’s going to work now. Though as you say in Age of Sigmar it’s not really a consideration anymore.