Quarter 1 Week 4 Update: Four is the New Five

Hello and welcome back to Hammer the Backlog, the weekly mini painting, productivity and accountability blog. I’m Mick, the one who hammers the backlog, and over the last few days I’ve been suffering my own hell of being a creature biologically designed for the cold having to deal with 30 degree heat every day. So don’t tell me I don’t know what it feels like to live the constant suffering of the Dark Eldar.

SCORECARD

A little bit of red in the ledger this week, with only 4 Incubi painted, rather than 5. I don’t remember buying these models, but I know the idea was always to have them as the bodyguard for my Morathi conversion. What I didn’t realise (or more likely, what I forgot), was that there is no version of the Dark Eldar army which has four incubi as a legal unit.

So off to eBay in went, with the kind of clenched buttocks one usually has when looking for 90s metal models. But no, for whatever reason, 3rd edition Dark Eldar seem to have avoided the crazy price inflation of other “oldhammer” and “middlehammer” models.

I was going to try to get one of Asdrubeal Vect’s bodyguards, the Incubi in The Matrix-like long coats, but they are expensive. I had forgotten that in the old days Incubi could actually have special weapons, not just melee. So in the end I got myself an Incubi (Incubus?) with a shredder. He should be here in a couple of days.

Remember that buying or replacing spares to make up full units is one of the only times I allow myself to add to the pile, so this was a rare treat.

THIS WEEK’S MODELS

So this week’s models are the four Incubi that I do have. I pretty sure these were my favourite models from back in the late 90s when I bought this army, and I honoured that by painting them pretty much exactly like I did back then, but slightly better.

Most of the colours are exactly the same as the warriors from the last few weeks. 

These are really, really interesting models. I’m pretty sure they are the only Dark Eldar models with soul stones on them. I know in more recent fluff, these nodules are probably “sensors” or “life support” or other things like that, but that seems to be fluff that came much later.

Even the idea of the soulstones being taken from defeated aspect warriors doesn’t seem to come from this edition, as there is almost no explanation of who the Incubi are in this very sparse book. I could be wrong there, I didn’t read every word in the book.

The next thing is just how “evil Striking Scorpions” these guys are. The helmets, with the stinger blaster and the very prominent mandibles and segmented tail are much more scorpion than even the stinking scorpions’ actual helms. I wonder if at some stage the idea was that every Dark Eldar unit would just be “evil” Eldar?  Might we have got evil Howling Banshees? Or did that idea become Wyches?

Anyway, love these guys. They are going to look great next week with an actual Archon to guard.

HAMMER THE FRONTLOG

Jim managed to keep up his side of the Hammer the Frontlog bargain and finish his unit of Custodes terminators to a standard he is happy with before buying any more models.

One box down, many to go?

Jim went for a glazing approach to give some volume to the red on the capes, and a gentle drybrush of a bright metal to highlight the golds and metals. Bases remain undecided, since we are not sure if the Shadowkeepers actually leave the depths of the palace on Terra. So they may actually stay black.

Jim is fully aware of the fact that he made his life 60 to 100% more difficult by going for black with gold trim rather than fully gold. By, guys, Jim is just like that sometimes.

We put the final few finishing touches on them between bench pressing at Jim’s home gym. Talk about super-sets. Men.

It’s a box of five Custodian Guard for Jim next, after resisting the temptation to “save” money by buying a full combat patrol that he might never finish.

I might need to make a modern army to lose to these guys at some stage.

Thanks for reading all of that, see you next week for my Morathi Archon conversion, and hopefully the fifth Incuguy, if he shows up on time.

Best of eggs!