This week I’m dealing with the perfidious Aeldari and January’s ‘Mini of the Month’, a Striking Scorpion Aspect Warrior!

Modelling

Don’t roll your eye just yet, this isn’t another army project to distract me from my 2025 hobby goals. It’s simply a proof of concept to see how LED Aspect Warrior helmets look and find out if LED mandiblasters are feasible. Having said that, I don’t get much Game Workshop new release FOMO these days, but I must admit the Aeldari releases are making me sweat a little…

The LED helmet and eye lenses were made using the techniques described in my LED Eye Lens Tutorial. As you can see in the image below, only the upper portion of the helmet was cast in resin. The eyes used a single 3V red 0805 SMD chip LED and a 47 ohm resistor (also available pre-wired from Small Scale Lights). This is smaller than the 1.8mm LED that I normally use for Space Marine eye lenses, since there’s not as much room in Aeldari helmets.

The mandiblaster muzzle flares were created using the techniques described in my Simple LED Muzzle Flare Tutorial. There are two separate 3V yellow 0805 SMD chip LEDs each connected to a 47 ohm resistor (again also available pre-wired from Small Scale Lights). The muzzle flares were sculpted from Water Splash Effect Gel, available from Green Stuff World.

All three LED circuits were connected in parallel with each other to a single 3V CR2032 coin cell and switch in the base.

Painting

While I’m mostly happy with the paint job as a whole, I think I would try a different green next time. I checked Striking Scorpions on the Citadel Colour app, and it informed me that the receipe used Waaagh! Flesh as a base, with highlights of Warpstone Glow and Moot Green. It wasn’t until I was fully committed that I realised this probably wasn’t correct and the “official” scheme was a lot brighter.

I try to stick close to the official scheme and stock poses for LED ‘proof of concepts’ such as this one. It’s about not changing too many variables at once. I may possibly come back and make a Blades of Khaine Kill Team at some point. If I do, I’ll probably be a little more adventurous with the paint palette, perhaps bringing in some blacks and yellows.

So now the Striking Scorpion is done and dusted and I’ve satisfied myself that LED mandiblaster are possible, does that mean I’ll be getting back to my planned 2025 projects?

*Checks workbench*

Erm, no…

Please come back again soon to find out what my next tangent will be! As ever, thanks very much for reading, and please remember you can also find me sharing my work on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon.