Kabal of a Thousand Nights

The Kabal of a Thousands Nights is the very small and WIP Dark Eldar army.  I've long been a supporter of the Craftworld Eldar but wanted to take the dive and try out a Dark Eldar army.  The updated models are absolutely gorgeous and the difficult play style is something I wanted to try out.  So, if you can tell from my iPhone photos, these Dark Eldar are not dark at all.  They are painted in Dheneb Stone/Rakarth Flesh with Blue/Grey weapons and green leather/flesh.  As I thought about the DE I decided that I wanted to do something out of the norm and so I began brainstorming army ideas, background, color schemes, names, etc.

Something I love about the Dark Eldar is their semi-nomadic nature in real space.  The appear seemingly from nowhere, descend upon isolated settlements or worlds, take what they need and want, then vanish.  This idea reminded me of the marauding tribes in pre-islamic Arabia that would descend out of the desert and attack villages, trade caravans, etc.  So, I wanted a color scheme that was simple, striking, gave homage to Islam and the history of the Middle East (I studied Arabic, Farsi, and the Middle East in University).  So the armor is painted to look like sand and camouflage the raiders and warriors as they attack out of the desert.  The green color is fun to paint, striking with the desert colors, and is recognized as the color of Islam because this is the color that Muhammed wore.  Not only that, but I thought that it looked remarkably like Ork skin and that the nomadic nature of the DE could transfer into them hunting, and herding tribes of Orks in addition to terrorizing other peoples.

As I hope you can see in the photos I used greenstuff to create scarves around the faces of each of the models.  This will be a recurring theme throughout the army (except possibly on the Incubi who are too awesome to need scarves).  This is a throwback again to pre-islamic marauders, but also a realistic way for the DE to keep the sand and sun away from their mouths and skin.  I am really bad with green stuff so it also gives me an opportunity to practice and get more comfortable with the medium.  Perhaps I'll do a short tutorial on how to make them for people that are interested.

I don't want to write a novel and have a ton of work that I should be doing instead so I'll leave the back story until a later post.  I know that the army badge will be Arabic script for one thousand in a stylized and brutal way.  I really enjoy writing Arabic so it will be fun to incorporate it into the models.  I'm actually hoping to practice painting a few of these guys with the airbrush soon and see if I can speed up the laborious line highlight process.  We'll see how that goes (I don't have a lot of hope because of the thickness of the paints).  I'll leave you with two more WIP models.  I haven't quite decided on the basing scheme.  I had thought to use desert themed but know that contrast is nice so I might base them in an urban theme as if they had just entered the city.  I don't know yet.

The shock prow already looks like
it has Arabic Script on it!