Project Wood Elves: First Test Model

The paralelisms with the Skaven project continue....

While this is not the first Wood Elf that I paint in my life, it is probably the first Warhammer Wood Elf I paint in 25+ years. In fact, I can say for certain that I have not painted too many Elves of any kind.... 

Before starting I spent quite some time browsing miniatures and looking at other armies. In the end I settled for some style I want to keep with NMM, green and yellow bright colours with some brown, I want to use some glazing and shading and I want to add some texture to cloths. Overall I want to put to work some of the techniques I have learnt in the past couple of years and take my sweet time with each figure as opposed to "get them as fast as I can ready to battle". I have decided that painting this army replaces one of the objectives of the year, as I will focus on Wood Elves instead of painting Kill Teams. My main source for inspiration is this Army from Mariano. I just love how they look like. Of course I know I won't be able to do even a fraction of what he did but I still hope to create something nice.

1. Here you can see the first test models. I am satisfied with the skin and cape, I mean lots of things to improve but shadows and colours are fine. On the other hand I don't like the leather and boots so that needs to change. Same thing with the base, I need to add some grass flock and probably use a lighter shade for the first layer as it is right now "too brown" for a Wood Elf... 
2. As for the horse, I am quite satisfied overall with the skin and leather. I probably overdid a bit the skin since I spent quite some time going back and forth with the texture and the lights, I need to find the right pace and improve it for the future as I have about 20 of those to paint and this one took me two hours!
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4. For being the first test models they are not bad, but far from being what I want them to be. More to come soon but at least some progress is being made!

As I use these posts for future reference for myself, I want to keep track of the paints as well.

I used these for the NMM metal and for the skin of the horse. For the skin I applied multiple layers of 

a glaze of Wolf Grey, and then some with Neutral Grey for the shadows. For the highlights I skipped the bone as the change of tone was too noticeable.

These were "as is" used for the wooden parts. For the leather I used either the flat brown or the beige one as base and then I mixed the base colour with beige red (from the skin palette) to get a lighter version and stippled it. Then added some texture and scratches with even a lighter version mixing it with bone 70.918

These were used for the golden bracelets and for the horse's hair.

These are the ones for the lighter green cloth parts, and the blue is for a glaze to give some depth. I mixed the base green with the yellow to get an intermediate tone.

These are the skin colours, from base to highlight, used "as is" without mixing.

I used these ones for the cape and the lila was for the shadows. I did multiple layers mixing different amounts of them but honestly it is not needed, it can be used directly and then the differences can be finetuned with a glaze of base colour.