I’ve painted a lot of Autarchs – like a lot of Autarchs, and most of them have been straight-up kitbashes. This is one that I’d actually gone out of my way to avoid for a while because I thought the wings and the winged helmet looked a little bit weird, or because I didn’t feel like I could get this to fit the aesthetic of my army. Recently though I came around and wanted to give it a shot, and around the same time my coveted rainbow-flavored Fire Prism suffered (another) fatal wiring issue that’s tabled it – so if I want to make my foes on the tabletop taste the rainbow, I was going to need a new delivery method.

This one is pretty straightforward for the most part, in that it’s the same as my usual HQ Ulthwe painting scheme – lots of black and bone colors, a little green for the straps, and with the HQs I try to add a little bit of a royal blue just to make them look even more fancy. I added Fire Dragon-esque yellow to the fusion pistol, some glitter to the power sword, and used the feathers on the wings to break up the rainbow into even segments. Gems were also pretty straightforward, and the last thing I added was a little more of that Daughters-of-Khaine-esque blood to the basing.

This one really ended up being the yin to the last Autarch’s yang, and some of that wasn’t even intentional. It was only when I finished that I realized I’d inverted the helmet colors. One looks flashy and flamboyant, and the other looks very edgy and dark. And…for an Eldar army focused on walking a path, with recurring yin-yang motifs on some of their decal sheets, I think that’s very a propos. Looking forward to running this in 10th edition, especially since Lone Operatives are pretty solid picks right now.