I recently finished my Fire Dragons and I was excited to paint more Aeldari, so I decided to crack on with the new Swooping Hawks. The kits are lovely and have lots of options for the Exarch and multiple head choices but I went for a pretty standard build. In today’s post I have lots of tips for building and assembling your Swooping Hawks as well as a detailed painting guide.

This is such a nostalgic trip for me. I remember buying the metal Swooping Hawks in blister packs back in the mid 90s. It was £5 for 4 metal models and you had to buy the Exarch separately. Fast forward 30 years and Games Workshop have sent me the new plastic Swooping Hawk set and I just had to paint them in the same colours I did in the late 1900s.

The colour scheme is inspired by Swooping Hawks that featured in an old 90s White Dwarf. They were part of a 2000pt Ulthwe army that Adrian Wood used to get a hard fought draw against Jake Thornton’s Space Wolves.

I changed the scheme by inverting the helmet colours. The originals have a black helmet with yellow face plate. I could only find black decals of the Swooping Hawk icon for the helmet, so I had to paint the helmets yellow so you could see the transfer icon. I think yellow helms makes more sense for my Ulthwe army, they certainly match the Fire Dragons I painted. I also changed the gold on the Lasblasters to Wraithbone.

I really enjoyed army building my Blood Angels by painting new units for bigger games of Warhammer 40,000 against Dunk and I want to do the same with my Aeldari. It’s a huge motivator knowing you don’t want to let a mate down. I’m not into playing with unpainted miniatures, it’s cool if you don’t mind the grey plastic tide but it’s not for me. I think Dunk’s starting an Ultramarine army and we’re both aiming for 1000pts. We’re slow painters so we don’t have a date in the diary yet but you can follow our progress on this blog.

How to Paint Aeldari Swooping Hawks

No new army would be complete without one of my reference cards. These recipe cards are essential to me being able to paint so many different factions and maintain a colour consistency across a single faction that I could be painting for many years. Before we get to the painting guide, I wanted to share some insights in prepping your models.

You can see in the above pictures, I’ve undercoated the models with white and then used Tamiya masking tape to protect the wings before airbrushing the bodies with Fenrisian Grey. This just saves me having the wings as another separate sub-assembly to manage.

I wanted a sky blue colour for the armour, so I used a spare body from the Swooping Hawk kit and glued it to a piece of sprue to practice some colour combinations. This extra step might look like it takes more time to paint your unit but it could save you days of painting if you just rush into painting the models. Getting the colours wrong could mean stripping the models, so a test piece is always advisable.

With my scheme planned out, it was time to assemble the models. It’s worth considering working in sub-assemblies. I know I want yellow helmets so I keep them separate and base coat them a different colour to the bodies, this is a great time saving effeciency. I left the gun arms separate as well, this doesn’t save time but I can get to the bodies with a paint brush which makes painting easier.

Aeldari have very clean and smooth surfaces. They really suit neat and tidy painting. I like painting in this style but even for me that means slowing right down and trying to be as accurate as possible. This group of five models took me two weeks to build and paint. I’ll aim to add one or two units a month at this speed. This gives you a rough idea of how long it takes me to paint an army.

I hope you follow me on my path of the warrior as I paint 1000pts of Aeldari to play some games. I can’t wait to paint contemporary equivalents of models I owned over 30 years ago… Striking Scorpions, Wraithlord, Avatar… all of it!