Eldar Repaint - Guardians

The boys at ABO and myself have set ourselves a 2014 Army Showcase. This means at the end of 2014 we all hope to have a fully painted with little to no proxies army. 

I have been using this Eldar army quite consistently over the past few games and have had quite success with it owing to their flexibility:

Farseer [Warlord]: Mantle of the Laughing God, Runes of Witnessing, Witchblade, Jetbike
Farseer: Runes of Witnessing, Singing Spear, Jetbike
Fire Dragons x6: Wave Serpent - Holofields, Twin Linked Scatter Lasers, Shuriken Cannon
Guardians x10: Wave Serpent - Holofields, Twin Linked Scatter Lasers, Shuriken Cannon
Dire Avengers x10: Wave Serpent - Holofields, Twin Linked Scatter Lasers, Shuriken Cannon
Windrider Jetbike x3
Windrider Jetbike x3
Warp Spiders x8
Warp Spiders x8
Fire Prism: Holo Fields
War Walker x3: Bright Lance, Scatter Laser

The mix of troops allow me to react to opponents and is still fun for them. However, the paint scheme is really old and I wanted to update the army so this 1850 list would be the repaint. 

BeefNuggets helped me with some suggestions on the paint scheme. 

Old scheme had a number of colours on the Guardian model thus lacking the focus

Green, greywhite, black and bone - all leading to a very confused model

BeefNuggets then suggested that I stick to a 80-20 rule. Now what is that? 

Eldar as an army tend to be enigmatic, aloof and pristine. It made sense that they would echo this in their uniform. Clean crisp colours together with a 80-20 formula. 80% of the model would be the primary colour while 20% would make up the other contrasting but CLEAN secondary colour. 

Beef suggested I drop the greywhite and bone to replace it with white. 

Yes, white. One of the hardest colours to do. 

But Beef has a solution and demonstrated a simple and effective method. Grey highlighted to white in 3 steps. 

Following his technique, I went out to the store to get myself 3 colours:

1. Celestra Grey
2. Ulthuan Grey
3. Skull White

Simply paint each white element in 1, 2 then 3, making sure that you leave a little of each layer showing. 

Production line - removed all the green, greys, bone colours. 

Finished product! 

Natural lighting seem to treat the models a little better

Close up on the models on the left

Close up for the models on the right

Beef suggested I remove all the green gems too as they were too high contrast and replace them with a more soothing red. That I did and the above is the product of about 1 hour of painting for 3 days.