Wood Elf Waywatcher (Gary Morley, 2007) #Fembruary 2022

Citadel Wood Elf Waywatcher (Gary Morley, 2007)

My last Fembruary model today (though not quite my last February model to share) – a Wood Elf Waywatcher, released alongside the Warhammer Armies: Wood Elf sourcebook in 2007. A Gary Morley sculpt, the technique is competent, but the sculpt itself is a bit of an overdetailed but indistinct mess – full of “wait.. what is THAT supposed to be?”-type details, which frankly make the model notsomuch fun to paint. As you can see, it’s a complete mess of “visual noise” up close, but given the four-foot test, it looks fine. So I’ll call that a “good enough” win.

Citadel Wood Elf Waywatcher (Gary Morley, 2007)

Just one Waywatcher, you ask? Yep. This one was a model selected to represent Marouda’s Elven archer in a long-gone, lightweight but decent fun but, low-effort, kill-and-loot pathfinder “campaign”. We didn’t get all that far, and the “long-gone part is probably the biggest reason why the model never got completed – and Fembruary is the reason that it now finally did get completed. I’ve got a few more of these somewhere, but they’re not likely to see the painting desk until we get back into the swing of something like Kings of War or AoS again. I’d like to do so this year, but there’s a lot of cleaning and clearing and culling to do first…

High Elf Mage with Sword (Gary Morley, 1998)

High Elf Mage With Sword 021003901, Gary Morley, 1998

“Too Sweet!”

This model is one I started painting several years ago. A High Elf Mage from that Warhammer Fantasy range’s refresh back in 1997, I needed a High Elf Wizard model to represent Immeril, the Eladrin Wizard character in the Ravenloft D&D boardgame that we’d started playing the first time around way back then. Eladrin, it turns out means “Elf” and “Elf-kin”. So a High Elf mini was roped into play. This particular model is one I liked, as it’s a little more subdued for a Warhammer model (ie: no gigantic hat)

As I noted some time ago, I don’t want my High Elves to look like everyone else’s High Elves. Silver armour with blue trim. It’s a good looking scheme, no doubt, but everyone’s models look like that! Instead, I took inspiration from World of Warcraft (which I was still playing at the time) and their High Elf offshoot, the Blood Elves. I’m not going to go into their convoluted background here, suffice it is to say that they look aesthetically pleasing and also different enough to the standard.

So I did that.

High Elf Mage With Sword 021003901, Gary Morley, 1998

The main drawback was the fact that when we stopped playing these board games, all those years ago, I also stopped working on the related models, and so this guy sat in a tub, with a bit of red on him for years. When we started playing again, painting/completing this character wasn’t a big priority until it started getting used, when we were into the second campaign and did a character shuffle. At that point, this model was being used on the table and then it wasn’t until after my Sigmarite Warrior Priest (as a D&D Cleric) got completed that I plucked this one out of the active game to finish off. Bjorn the Stormborn also announced a Painting Challenge for High Elves and Skaven around this time, and I hoped to also get this guy done as part of that as well. Unfortunately, as well as all of those stars aligned, personal circumstances also intervened, and I wasn’t able to complete this model until Early September, and I’m obviously only getting to posting it up now, at the start of October.