Imagine the scene, you’re 13 and you’ve just got your first White Dwarf magazine and you flick through the pages and you’re greeted with bright green battlefields and painted models in all the colours. It captures your imagination and you immediately want to be a part of it, you want to learn more… then you see it… the Eldar Ulthwe Dreadnought. Tall and slender armed with huge crushing fists and shoulder mounted plasma cannon. You’re blown away by how freaking cool it is. Well, that was me 31 years ago and it had such an impact on me that I decided to channel it’s awesomeness into my Aeldari Wraithlord. I’ll share more pictures and my painting guide in this article. 

What I love about the classic Eldar Dreadnought colour scheme is the use of bone. Asuryani (Craftworld Eldar) craft a lot of their equipment and machines from Wraithbone. Wraithbone is a solid that can exist in real space formed from psychic thoughts pulled from the warp. Aeldari on the path of the artisan will train to become skilled in Wraithbone sculptures. Technical, complex machinery will be made by Aeldari Bonesingers. It makes so much more sense to feature a lot of bone colour on a wraith construct. The bone also has a subliminal undead vibe.

What I didn’t like about the 1994 scheme is the red. Games Workshop loved red in the 90s. Their models had bright red, their stores were bright red, even the paint brush handles use to be red. The poor Eldar Dreadnought didn’t escape the red treatment with the painter randomly choosing to give it red kneecaps and a red plasma cannon muzzle. I’m an advocate for the design philosophy “less is more”, so I ditched the red.

With my colour scheme sorted in my head, I now had to build my Wraithlord. For weapon load out I could have matched the original with fists and star cannon, but this model is part of my Aeldari army which I’m going to play 40k games with. In 10th edition 40k, each datacard is a set points limit, you don’t pay any extra for additional weapons. You’d be crazy not maxing out the heavy weapon slots and giving him a Ghostglaive sword. I “borrowed” a Guardian Defender squad Brightlance so my Wraithlord could carry two. For the arms, I chose flamers ver shuriken cannons. I like the idea of him using the flamers in overwatch if something decides to charge him.

The original Eldar Dreadnought, is covered in runes and I wanted mine to be the same. I decided to use transfers (also known as decals). Annoyingly, there was no black Ulthwe emblem large enough to fit the loin cloth so I painted over a yellow icon with black whilst it was still on the transfer sheet, I think it looks pretty convincing.

How to Paint an Aeldari Wraithlord

The Wraithlord is pretty simple to paint with lots of smooth, curved surfaces. There aren’t many edges to highlight, so using volumetric shading and highlighting really suits it. To get the smooth blending of your volumetric shading/highlighting you can use lots of different techniques. Easiest method is dry brushing, but it’s messy and can look “chalky”. Another easy method is banding, where you mix colours together and paint a new layer over the previous dried layer leaving a little of the previous layer showing through. Repeat this with slightly different colours each time and you’ll great a blend. Banding is time consuming and can leave lines showing. An advanced technique is airbrushing, that can create smooth blends but the downside is over spray, you’ll be forever masking areas with putty or tape. My method is glazing with thinned paint. Thin water colour painting. Painting successive translucent layers on top of each other can really create seamless soft blends. It’s quicker than banding and doesn’t require mixing colours but it’s much harder to do and takes a lot of practice.

Project Ulthwe Army 2025

My Aeldari are my main focus for 2025. My goals are paint 1000pts and play a game and then 1500pts and play another game. If I can do that in 2025 I’ll be over the moon. I’ve been distracted by Soulblight Gravelords recently and the new Killteam Typhon looks amazing so I might have to take some time off painting Aeldari for a bit, but when I look at how cool the army is coming together, I really want to paint more… maybe even a second Wraithlord armed with a Starcannon, fists and red knees?