Mark Raynor has worked within our Production Studio for a few years now and is well known within the Studio for his Vampire Counts army. However, Mark has recently decided to begin work on his next army, the High Elves. Here he talks about how he went about collecting and painting them.

I had decided some time ago that I would collect around five armies for Warhammer. Yes, I like Warhammer that much! I wanted to carefully choose each army based on the background, imagery and model range. However, I also wanted a good variety of gaming and modeling style to enable me to grasp all kinds of rules and tactics. The first army I chose was the valiant Bretonnians, an army that I always remind myself to return to at a later date (promise!). Then I discovered the dreaded Vampire Counts. My Undead swelled nicely to a considerable force of around five thousand points. However, painting all of this dark colour with rotting flesh and bone was becoming a bit of a ritual. It was at this point that the new High Elf range was beginning to appear and the models were a big influence in my choice of which army to collect next. Knowing that the colour scheme for High Elves is predominantly white and light colours, this also provided me with a refreshing change.

After getting my hands on the new plastic regiment of High Elf Spearmen, I began to experiment with the colour scheme that I would use for my army, always the first task when starting a new force. Using the colour section in the High Elves Armies book as a reference point, I tried various colour schemes based on greens, blues and greys but they didn’t quite give me the look that I wanted. Although High Elves are considered elegant, good and noble, I wanted to give them a bit of a harder edge.

This I aimed to achieve through my army colour scheme. It would need to be something that would make them a little different from other High Elves, but not stray too much into the shades of the Dark Elves. On closer examination of the history and background text, I came to the decision of basing my army on an old childhood favourite of mine -- Dragons.

The Dragons of Caledor and their history was truly inspirational for me and I chose red as my main army colour, red being a ‘traditional’ colour for Dragons. Although this wasn’t a common colour for High Elves, I knew that if I combined it with enough white and silver it would provide me with the scheme that I needed.

In addition, two of our resident ’Eavy Metal team had already experimented with some brilliant effects with red paints and inks. These two models would inspire and encourage me to try out some of these techniques on my more elite regiments and characters.

Phoenix Guard by Neil Green