Eldar Fighter Skimmer Thing

 So, in an earlier post I mentioned the Eldar equivalent of a pickup truck...

You don't have to be an expert in Warhammer to realise that the 40k world is a bloody ugly place. Whether it's lumpy tanks, snarling demons, Gestapo-lite commissars, zombie-bondage-mutant things (that covers a fair chunk of Chaos, Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar), or just skulls and more skulls piled on a big unimaginative heap of skulls, there's not a lot that could be called elegant in the 40k setting. The Tau and the Eldar are the two main exceptions.

I happened to find two partial Dark Eldar venom transports for sale on ebay. Once you take the crew, chains, spikes and guns off these things, they're actually very sleek and stylish. The curved body looks really cool. They remind me of the smooth, fishlike spaceships of 1970s science fiction art, like this picture by Chris Foss:

Back in the 90s, a company called Psygnosis made computer games for the Amiga. For their cover art, they used a lot of pictures by Roger Dean, who also drew album covers for the prog band Yes. While I am wary of prog to say the least, some of Dean's pictures have the sort of feeling I'd want for my Eldar.

I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's something about the blended pastel colours and the lack of intense detail (which is fortunate, as detail isn't my area). Anyway, with all that slightly pretentious stuff out of the way, here's what I did with the "broken" venoms.

First, I took off the little pods under the fusilage, which carry guns and hooked blades. This made the silhouette even more sleek. Then I needed to add a shuriken cannon somehow. Putting it under the ship looked clumsy, and mounting it on the top made the venom look like some kind of space pixie version of those Toyota pickups equipped with machine guns in third-world warzones.

So, I cut what looked like a headlamp from between the two "pincers" at the front of the ship, just before the cockpit. I sliced off the barrel from a shuriken cannon and pinned it into place there. It looks even more sleek than before, if you ask me, and doesn't interfere with the "line" of the ship. I assume that the workings and ammo for the gun are inside the fusilage, like a nose-mounted cannon on a fighter plane.

You've got to admit, it's a nice silhouette.

And that's all the converting I did. I then started painting it up in the blue that I've used for the rest of the army. I decided to add a new colour: I toyed with some kind of peach, but this was too tricky and so I went for purple instead. 

The pilot was the standard Dark Eldar one, with a smooth, featureless helmet. I thought it would look cool to put some kind of reflection on the helmet, like the reflections of the Arizona desert that Highway Patrol cops have in their sunglasses in films.

The canopy went on fine: I didn't glue it, although I might do later. It has a slightly naff heads-up targeter type thing, which I defy anyone to paint well. As it stands, the targeter just looks like a fancy symbol, which is fine by me.

I've got to admit, I'm pleased with this thing! Neeeeeowwwww!

I've got another of these to do, which ought to be a bit easier as it doesn't have a pilot. I'm sure I'll find some new way to make it awkward and difficult.