The next pair of completed models I have to share are this pair of Dark Elf Champions from the 4th Edition WHFB line. While I do like many in this series of models, sculpted by Aly Morrison and Colin Dixon, I still do prefer the previous 3rd edition-era models that were mostly sculpted by Bon Naismith – which were actually my first WHFB force, that I sadly sold backj in my yough, after deciding that I couldn’t afford to collect both Dark Elves and also Orcs & Goblins. I did keep a few of my favourites from that force, but as with my original Imperial Army/Squat force, I’m still a little sad that those models are long gone…

Yep! There’s that flame motif again! There is at least a story behind this one. Back sometime in the 1990’s when I was a gaming regular at a store in town, some guy randomly came in and wanted a miniature painted, and wanted someone to paint it for him. I said I’d do it for whatever amount (I can’t recall, but you know, a decent bit more than the base model), and so he selected a Dark Elf off the shelf and I took it home. That Dark Elf is the below one, with the purple scheme.

So I took the model home, painted it in a week, Marouda told me that she really liked the job I did on it, then I brought it back into the shop to hand it over. The guy never showed. I left it in the shop, and after 2 or three weeks, the guy still hadn’t turned up. So… I’d basically painted it for nothing.

After a full month or so, I told the guy in the store that since the guy had abanoned the model, I was going to take it home myself and give it to Marouda, having put in the work to paint it and because she liked it. He wasn’t so keen, so I bought an identical model off the shelf and told him I’d paint that one for the guy in case he ever came back, and left my number.

So in the end the guy never came back and I never got the second version finished. Years later I acquired the pointing model secondhand, and then started him in the same scheme which I’d decided on for my Kings of War Dark Elf force, which got waylaid for several years. Though this pair of models ended up on The Tray which meant that they finally got completed. The original, purple model remains basically just a display model for Marouda, but as it’s linked to the other two, I thought I’d add it to this post…