Today’s post is a big one in my Ulthwe army series, I get to share with you a milestone army picture. Finishing this Wave Serpent has mean’t I’ve hit exactly 1200pts! I’ll use this blog post to talk about the army so far, what the next 300pts might look like, whilst showcasing some lovely photography of my recently completed Wave Serpent and as a bonus I’ll give you some tips on taking army pictures.

My first Wave Serpent, I didn’t know who to transport, so I got some Wraithguard. This second Wave Serpent, now has a Wraithguard decal on it’s hull, so the Wraithguard are going in this new one… Who is going to use the first one I painted now? Maybe it’s a good point to talk about the next units I want to paint.

Craftworld Ulthwe played a big part in Eye of Terror campaign back in the early 2000s where Abbadon launched his 13th Crusade and we saw Wulfen and the 13th Company return from the warp. Ulthwe got metal arm pieces to upgrade Defender Guardians into Storm Guardians with better stats called Black Guardians. So for lore and narrative reasons I want to add a unit of Black Guardians decked out with close combat weapons… they won’t be completely naff and pointless as I can give them 2 special weapons. Flamers would be good for over watching things that charge me, but I’ll probably go with Fusion Guns.

Currently, the army has two weak characters which are only really there to boost squads with aura abilities. So I need a kick-ass character to lead me into 1500pt games. Seeing as I have 5 Fire Dragons in a Falcon that can seat 6, it would be rude not to take Fuegan. The model is phenomenal and will look amazing. I do want Eldrad Ulthuan, but I see him as more of a replacement for my current Farseer when I get to 2000pts and Fuegan is a beast who can stand back up on a dice roll when reduced to 0 wounds.

Adding Storm Guardians and Fuegan leaves me 80pts under my 1500pt target. My next choice is Striking Scorpions, but there is a problem. They’re 85pts! I think I might just paint them and hope that the Balance Dataslate knocks 5pts off somewhere. It’s not completely out of the realms, in Games Workshop’s recent adjustment to points values, my Blood Angel 2000pt list came down to 1920pts! Who is the Aeldari God of points costs? I think I need to meditate at the foot of their alter.

Things are looking up for my Craftworld Ulthwe project. The army is looking pretty solid with a great core of units I can build upon. I am missing close combat units and I don’t have any battle line units but that will change adding Storm Guardians and Striking Scorpions. I really love the look of my Grav Tanks and Wraithfighter. A consistent paint scheme goes a long way and it’s making me want to add a Fire Prism Grav Tank.

How to Paint an Aeldari Wave Serpent

I went into a lot more detail in my Aeldari Falcon post on how I approached painting these vehicles, I’ll save myself repeating it here. I’ve included the recipe card though for convenience sake though. I will use this space to answer a question I get asked a lot.

How do you take army pictures?

Before I answer how I take pictures like the one above, it’s important to recognise what makes this picture so nice. First and most importantly, everything is in focus, secondly, the aspect ratio (width and height) of the image. Thirdly, the angle the picture is taken and finally, nothing is overlapping or blocking view.

Getting everything in focus is the hardest part. You have to understand a cameras limitations when it comes to depth of field. Briefly, focus depth will be less if you’re closer to the subject, but focus depth will be greater the further away you are. Take a landscape photo outside and quite a lot of the things in the frame will be in focus. Take a close up of a flower and the background will be blurry. Sadly, our miniatures are small so we have to take the picture close up. So to get round this I use a tripod to lock the camera in position and then take multiple shots of the army moving the focus point through the image, front to back, taking multiple photos. I then align and image stack these in photoshop. You can get iPad software called Affinity Photo that has this functionality and it’s a single one off price, not a subscription like Adobe products.

I mentioned aspect ratio, no this is nothing to do with Aspect Warriors. It’s the shape of the photo. the image above is like a 4:3. 4 units across x 3 units deep. The shape of your photo should be decided on your target audience. If you only post to instagram, you light want to use a 1:1 square ratio. if you post to Twitter, you’ll want to use 16:9. Army shots tent to be landscape. It’s harder to do portrait, remember things get smaller the further away they are. A portrait shot would need more rows of models and the ones at the back would be tiny.

For the angle, you want to experiment, but you want to be looking down on the army a little bit. This helps with the depth of field and helps immensely when trying to avoid models in the front blocking the view to models in the back .

This just scratches the surface of taking pictures of armies. It’s taken me years to dial it in. if you have more questions, pop them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I hope you follow me on my path of the warrior as I aim to hit my next milestone of 1500pts. Dunk is nearly at 1000pts with his Ultramarines and we’ll be getting a game in soon, so be sure to bookmark this site so you don’t miss it.