Mustering of the Kabal : Kabalite Warriors

Welcome back to the second installment of 'The Creation of a Kabal" and today I will be talking about the beating heart of a Dark Eldar Kabal, the Kabalite Warriors.

I for some reason love Kabalite Warriors, even the old ones that some people find horrible. I know that when I start Dark Eldar I would play these guys. When the rules came out for them, I am very pleased that a normal Kabalite can even take down a Trygon, and then I was really sold.

Conversion-wise, I did not do much about them, other than to swap some of their body parts with the Wyches but overall they blended very well together.

Now these are the first painted models in my army and this alone made me wonder; what the hell should I color them with? I for sure know that I never liked following the codex colors, and thus I went around finding some ideas. How the color scheme came around is kinda cute in my opinion.

I was thinking.....what kind of color that when people see moving around, they would be really alarmed? The colors must be very striking, and also very bright, but I do not really want to use too much of the color. Somehow the mind can envisage a totally awesome image, and amazingly the first thing that came up in my mind is actually this;


And somehow I felt that it is a totally awesome color, and not a lot of people use yellow in their armies which will make this army very unique. So with that I went about painting the colors.

But then the problem came about, other than black and yellow I need a color that would somehow blends itself naturally into the mix. This one takes some brainstorming to do, and after some experimentation, the winners are blue and white. Of course I will use these colors in small amounts in order to not overwhelm the models with too much color. Besides, yellow is a very bright color that would catch attention already.

While painting the Kabalites, I actually in a way cheated. I essentially did my best work on the yellow, the flayed skin and the optics, and as for the rest of the model I just do the most rudimentary painting techniques (simple highlights on the black for example) to make it look that I did spend some time on the other parts of the model. After some while painting; I finally ended up with this;

The Fodders


The Blasters


The Cannons

The Leaders

Amazingly I actually enjoyed this color scheme a lot. It is simple, elegant, and very striking.

When I brought these guys to playtest, quite a lot of eyes are attracted to the models, and their first response is often "Bees?". During the playtesting games, whenever I move my models, their eyes are a little more fixated than usual and I guess that is the thing I wanted to do with my Dark Eldar; You can't take your eyes off them for one second.

Suffice to say, the Rapturous Venom Kabal's colors is there to stay. Now I can only imagine how my vehicles would look like with the colors.......