Those Who Trade: Eldar

 Not the eldest.

Eldar trading contingent

Some really old-school sculpts here! The fellow with all the tubes is the Dark Elf Space Trooper from the March 1987 flyer; one of the very first Rogue Trader sculpts. It's a weird sculpt and pretty rare, but not as popular as the cool Piscean Warrior, so I was able to get it for a pretty reasonable price from an ebay oldhammer trader.

The master is the Eldar Trader from the famous Rogue Trader Adventurers from a few years later. Rogue Heresy has been going through the lot over the past few years; check out his take on the Eldar Trader here (he also did the Dark Elf, here). Others include Sho3box and Dale Hurst. 

It took me a while to decide on what to do with these two. The Dark Elf almost wound up part of my Dark Eldar project, the Kabal of the Sun Betrayed, but after deciding that the Slann traders would get an armed bodyguard, it made the most sense here.

Anyway, more photos below the cut.

Enigmatic Eldar trader, Eldar trading contingent

It was quite tricky to come up with a colour scheme for this fellow. They have a lounging, arrogant pose that I adored, plus all the punk 80s touches common to pointy-ears in this period; skin-tight pants, ribbons, a giant codpiece...

I decided to echo the decaying Melnibonean touches I'd used on some of my Wood Elf officers. After staring a lot at Jon's Eldar, I eventually settled on a white jacket, black leather pants, pink hair and human-skin boots. The codpiece, obviously, should be in silver burnished to a mirror finish.

The scheme deliberately doesn't tie into any of my Dark Eldar factions, nor any future Harlequin or Craftworld projects I may do. The scarification on the ear could indicate that they're an Exodite, but for all we know, they hail from a distant halator realm.

A real pleasure to paint, of course, like all these old sculpts are. I can't wait to have them lurking menacingly in game. Just as with the Slann, it's unlikely that this backwater colony produces anything the post-scarcity Eldar could want, so what are their people looking for?

The Dark Elf sculpt was even more of a challenge. It's uncommon, so only a few of the usual suspects have painted it, although I did stumble over this fantastic rendering on DakkaDakka. Chris Foss is an obvious place to start for Eldar, as their famous helmet designs resemble some of Foss's best spaceships.

I did know that I wanted to do bronze for the mesh armour. I figured it would deliberately make the figure seem anachronistic, a throwback; I use the same technique for my Wood Elves to emphasise their rustic backwardness. Here it ties into age of the miniature itself, but also serving as a contrast to his weird weapon - rendered as I often do in bone tones.

What a load of waffle. I spend a lot of time thinking about these things, but I really have no idea what I'm doing. For instance, once I finally settled on grey for the hard points of the armour (inspired by Stro'knor Macekiller), I was going to do the helmet in blue with pink stripes... except I had used that on the Scourge mercenaries in my Dark Eldar. (Like I said above, I didn't want these guys to look like they came from any extant faction.)

The green looks pretty snazzy, though.

After agonising about it, I eventually settled on purple for all the weird tubes, and here we are.

Eldar envoy. © Games Workshop.
Source unknown. Used without permission.

I mentioned last time that I only had two sapient members of the civilian project to paint. Well, this is them. Of course, I haven't shown you one of the other sapients that I have painted - but I haven't finished his set yet. Keep tuned to this channel, spacefarers...