Spotlight On... Forest Spirits of the Wood Elves

Going full steam ahead over on Conflict Valorax, my Warhamnmer 40,000 site, is leaving me precious little time to dedicate to that other most precious endeavour: Warhammer Fantasy. Still, I was perusing some of my Wood Elf Forest Spirits this morning and thought I'd bring them down off the shelf to get a closer look.

Dryads are lovely models. They aren't too expensive and they're reasonably quick to build (though sticking the arms on is a bit annoying with such a small surface area of join. It's possible to put a whole army of these together pretty quickly and in the old rules I'd have been more inclined to as these guys had great advantages in woody terrain. Now though... Not so much. They're still good, and with 2 Attacks each and high Strength and Weapon Skill they're nice to have around.

I painted mine the same colour as I did my trees: a Scorched Brown first coat and then Codex and Fortress Grey as highlights, picking out the leafy skirts in dark and lighter greens. I wanted to go a little further though so I purchased some of the amazing Clump Foliage; available from model shops, Hobbycraft, etc; and gave a suggestion of foliage on those bare upper branches.

Now this Treeman is one of the joint first Warhammer miniatures I ever bought (in a bulk buy from a kid in the paper) and for years I didn't use him because I thought he was crap. I didn't like his pose and he was far too small. I tried various ideas to change his pose but none panned out.

Then I had the idea of adding some spare branches from the Citadel Forest set. Some clump foliage later and voila! NOW he's one of my favourite models and the only one that I've managed to pull off (to my satisfaction) the glowing red eyes. Astute readers will have noticed that I FEAR eyes and tend to leave them shaded. I went a little further on this chap and am glad I did.