Age of Sigmar Moon Aelves part 3

In time for the #28magchallenge deadline, here is my complete Ian Miller inspired force of Moon Aelves, descended from the wandering moon Celine to steal the breaths of mortal folk.

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The Upadana

The heavy troops, the Upadana, wield repeater crossbows and are sustained by weighted environment suits. These low-caste warriors are so light that their sealed enviro-suits are necessary for tethering them to the ground.

The Garuda

The light troops, the Garuda, have swords and shields and appear to dance weightlessly through the air toward their foes. Warriors from a noble caste, their degree of weightlessness is more manageable and can be used to their advantage in battle through a combination of skill and training.

Aszyphaimelon

The Tidecaster, Aszyphaimelon commands the tidal-gravitational forces that permit the Moon Aelves to remain on the grounds of the Mortal Realms. He can assist them to surge forwards at speed, steady them in place as heavy as rock, or even hurl foes into the air.

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The idea for the paint scheme for the Moon Aelves came to me before the idea for the models themselves. I saw some tarnished silver and thought it would make for a cool look for a set of models. Obviously that would work best on someone wearing a full suit of plate armour. Thinking about what bitz from what ranges would make up a full plate suit (rarer than you'd expect in GW's range!) led me to Elves, and the idea grew from there.

The models can be ranked up, WFB style

So I found myself painting a light silver with a tarnish effect. In the airless environment of the moon Celine silver is abundant and doesn't tarnish at all, so the Moon Aelves produce all sorts of architecture and so on using the material. It's only in the atmosphere of the Mortal Realms that the raiders' suits of armour oxidise and turn dirty black, which of course annoys them greatly.

I haven't seen much silver (as a metal) in Warhammer model projects before, and so it was difficult to approach. I found some good reference images of antique silver online. One different aspect of silver as a material is that the recesses can remain untarnished and shiny while the edges and surfaces blacken. I usually try to avoid shading to pure black or highlighting to pure white so that was the first block to overcome! Then I was very wary of applying any tarnish at all once I had a nice clean silver base with shading. Eventually I matt varnished over the completed silver armour and then added tarnish effects.

I mixed up each model's tarnish color separately from blue, brown, green, red, brown, grey and black so that the hues would vary between models. It was all stippled and much thinned with either matt medium or glaze medium. I also removed some of the tarnish while it was still wet by wiping the edges with my finger, and this process went back and forth until I was happy with the effect.

The Garuda got moon-shields made from smoothed-down Marauder shields. The moon design on each was made to look like it could be natural weathering that just happened to resemble the pitted surface of a moon. I made the effect from stippling black mixed with medium onto a light silver base layer.

All the gems on the models were painted to look like moonstone (of course!) so a combination of swirled light blue and orange with the standard GW gem gradient/highlight effect.

The Tidecaster was the only one with any additional colour of his own other than silver! I think the scrolls and vial are subtle enough to not look too out of place. In tribute to the classic Farseer sculpt I based the conversion on, I painted a wraithbone design onto his tabard (after trying and failing to sculpt a wraithbone tabard out of greenstuff).

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There is in fact one remaining model that I was unable to finish in time for the #28magchallenge deadline. I hinted at the silver ships that transport the Moon Aelves from the moon Celine, and of course one such flying boat does exist in Games Workshop's Aelf range.

The Skycutter is a nice kit. Of course those used by the Moon Aelves don't need to be drawn by a giant bird but instead sail on cosmic lunar rays.

This is in the very early stages of painting. I'm going with silver (of course) and a pale silvery wood. There's gonna be at least one pilot, who is likely going to be a Skywarden.

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Really looking forwards to seeing the other entries for #28magchallenge. It's been a lot of fun to follow on Instagram!

Thanks for following.

Hek