Wood Elves - flower color scheme?

[Luxure de Sang]

I am a new player but I'm not new to the game - as my bf has been obsessed with it for well over 2 years now and after buying a battalion and a few extras I've been debating with myself for the better part of about 12 hours on a color scheme. I have decided I'm going to be basing my armies paint scheme around a very vibrant flower - a Plumeria. This is a picture of what some look like:


I want something that will... ultimately look fun and not look like your standard season themed wood elves army. One of my major concerns is on whether or not I should bother with trying to convert some of the units so that they have these flowers on them or if the whole idea is ridiculous.

I don't have any pictures of said started projects as of yet seeing as how my local GW does not carry any neon pinks I've ordered some reaper paints because they have the very bright colors I'm looking for.

I've already started sketching out most of the units so I can color on paper roughly what they will look like and what colors will suit which areas. I'm mostly posting here because I would really appreciate some feedback on whether or not you all think this would be utterly ridiculous or if you have any suggestions as to different conversions I could try to make this theme more cohesive to the units.

I don't' know if this will help but I have a decent amount of painting experience as I've painted a large portion of my bf's Warriors of Chaos army and all the Goblins from Battle for Skull pass -.- so however advanced your suggestions may be I'm open to them.  

[Vikki Stardust]

Single out a few minis and use those as testing models. Just go wild on those and keep them on a shelf near where you normally sit and do your things, whenever your busy you can look at them and think about whether you still like them or not. That's how I did things, took me forever to get my orks right but it was worth it. sweatdrop  

[Luxure de Sang]

lol As I'm reading this I already have most of my paints ready and I just finished the base coat on an extra spider rider I had. Hopefully get that painted today and go from there. I'll try and get some pics today or tomorrow on how it looks :3  

[Luxure de Sang]

Well I did my test model - el spider- and I hate it. I love vibrant things like bright pinks and oranges and I thought that I could make my army flow with that but after looking at this spider with its pink/gold/orange legs I'm absolutely doubting how it'll work out.

I'm probably going to end up just drawing a dryad or glade guard and just color them a few different ways and see which one seems like it would flow the best, but as of right now definitely not motivated after spending the whole day blending paints to get the right shades and then hating the end result sweatdrop

Maybe I should just paint them winter themed and be done with it.  

[Vikki Stardust]

It works better on the actual army models. xp  

[Luxure de Sang]

Oh no I realize that, I'm just not interested in dicking around with wood elves any longer tonight since I work early tomorrow, and usually if I have an idea of what colors I want it makes finding shades easier than just sitting there going hm I want blue but what blue paint should I use to get the shades that I want.

That's all I mean by that ^^.

I've just decided to paint some goblins for now :3  

[Hoxtalicious]

On paper it might not look as good as in real life. I know, I messed around with things for ages now until I got things right. Just set a model or two from your army aside and try working on them first, expensive I know, but it works a whole lot better than working on odd models that don't belong to the army and thus, don't share your vision.

I should know, it took me ages to get those Elysians all good and proper.  

[BloodyMary76]

Lt. Brookman

On paper it might not look as good as in real life. I know, I messed around with things for ages now until I got things right. Just set a model or two from your army aside and try working on them first, expensive I know, but it works a whole lot better than working on odd models that don't belong to the army and thus, don't share your vision.

I should know, it took me ages to get those Elysians all good and proper.

Oh Mac, you act like you finished them. ^^

As far as the elves go, I like your color idea, but I admit it might be hard to implement. You can also try looking around online at pictures of painted wood elves, maybe you can find someone with a theme similar to your idea that worked well.  

[Luxure de Sang]

Yeah I ended up giving in this weekend and started painting one of my dryads. And although the color's didn't look too terrible actually on 'er it just did not live up to what I had wanted and I somehow managed to make one of the arms look like mustard in ketchup in my over zealous actions of wanting to shade the orange and yellows too early >.<

I actually checked out a few dev's and was on asrai for a while looking at the different armies and I saw a few techniques that people implemented on their dryads that really made them stand out - such as glowing eyes and what not. But generally speaking no one has used any kind of bright colors, I found the biggest thing was that someone would choose a tree or season and go from there. So I believe I'm going to go with that and have a generic season army which if I do a nice enough job on the painting I'm sure will look fine.

I'm thinking of winter and birch trees as of right now.  

[Roven]

It's funny. my ex from ages ago used to run elf armies and did a high elf army with a floral theme too, though she used color schemes of different flowers for different unit types. she used to seperate cloth areas like robes and sashes as the actual florae colors and vinery and such as tarnished leathers and woods. She had a regiment of spearmen that were based on a pale yellow frangipani scheme smile

all in all, it would really be a pretty army. and using birch for dryads would mix well with the plumeria colors  

[Messyart]

No idea how far you've goe with this but, I'd have gone for light, spring colours on their clothes with patterns painted over them as if the plumeria is growing on them, painting little flowers over the cloth and such..

And maybe look to some nice whitw barked trees for the dryads, and paint [or find lichen/ model flowers] the patterns onto the branches and such..

Obviously, bright pink wood isn't right, so you want them to flow naturally.


So, try sticking to using the flowers as decoration instead of the overall colour?

Flower buttons would be nice :3  

[Luxure de Sang]

First off...


I apologize for being M.I.A from my thread for so long. A lot of things have happened IRL, and as such my poor WE have taken the back burner for the past 4 months or so.

However in that time, I have finally finished the test model I was working on, and decided against doing flowers at all. Instead I've based my army and fluff around the forest spirits kicking a** only after some Beastmen started to burn down the forest.

As such My dryads will all be black, dark brown, and all highlighting is in white to give it that "ash" look. Eyes, detail and carvings are all red and orange to look like embers. I haven't started on the elves themselves yet, but so far I'm loving it.

I hope to provide you guys with some pictures relatively soon and hopefully will be more active around here.  

[DarkElf27]

Awesome, I'd love to see how those turn out.