Eldar come in many colors, but few as are iconic as the black guardians of Ulthwe! Bring Eldrad’s finest to the table in style with this simple tutorial for your army.
How to Paint Ulthwe Eldar
To most painters, black is either a really tricky color to achieve, or the too simple “spray with a black can and forget it” type of army. So our goal for these Ulthwe eldar is to make a black that stands out, but remains simple enough to paint across your entire army.
Because it is one of the simplest schemes, we can afford to put more effort into each individual colors without spending too much time on our models. This is done with the goal of painting an army’s worth of models in mind.
Black
The trickiest part of black is that as soon as you highlight it with a neutral grey, it stops looking like black and it becomes a dark grey. There is nothing more frustrating than having someone comment how nice our grey eldar look if they’re meant to be black.
To avoid the dark grey look, we are going to highlight our black base coat with something a little bit more interesting. In this case, Stegadon Scale green.
We could stop there and call it a day. But we can get a bigger contrast if we airbrush some lighter turquoise, Ahriman Blue, very lightly.
This will be much too light to be black, so we want to shade our model with Nuln Oil. If you were heavy handed with the highlights, you can do two thin coats of Nuln Oil here. Black should be dark, right?
We are not interested in edge highlighting here, as this will shift the focus of the color from black to the turquoise.
Bone
The other main color of Ulthwe is bone, which is for the weapons and the helmets. We are doing a similar effect here as we did on the Alaitoc Eldar, that also sport bone weaponry.
Ulthwe is somewhat of a reversed scheme from the other eldar craftworlds, as the inside of the helmet if a different color, not the outside.
On a bone base coat, shade with Seraphim Sepia, before highlighting with that same base color. We use Morghast Bone in this example, but feel free to pick one you like.
The traditional Ulthwe look is almost white, but in my opinion, adding the yellow tint from the seraphim sepia make for a better look overall.
Red
Another traditional color that you can swap is the red for the lenses and gems. The ‘official’ is red, but green, turquoise or purple would look just as good. The bonus of these lighter colors is that they work better than red on the eldar energy weapons.
We are going for a similar red as our Iyanden details. Start with a basecoat of Mephiston Red that’s highlighted Evil Sunz scarlet. Because this scheme is overall darker, we will shade the red using Caroburg Crimson.
Base
As with most dark paint schemes, basing for these eldar is quite easy, as most will look great. The one we went with is a rock base similar to the one you can find in this dollar e-book on Kindle.
