The above image shows two of the six Reaver Jet Bikes I completed recently. I learned my lesson on jet bike squad size from the Eldar and six is near optimum. With fewer, they get destroyed/broken in one round of mediocre shooting and with any more they become too much of a point sink. I will eventually have two squads in the army--each of them with slightly different paint schemes. This squad has the blue on top and purple on the sides. The next squad will reverse those colors. The color of the riders will remain the same.
These new Dark Eldar Jet Bike models are gorgeous. The detail of the sculpt and the manner in which they are assembled is amazing. Unlike the Raider (tank) that had to be painted in seven different parts, I could completely assemble the bike and the rider before painting them. This makes it easier to coordinate shadow and shine direction across the entirety of the model and prevents wasted time spent painting parts that eventually get covered during assembly.
Although the non-metallic metal paint technique I used on the blades and engine nozzle were the most complicated parts of the model, I'd have to say that hard-lining all of the edges is what made them so time-consuming to paint. There are joints, ridges, and sharp pointy bits all over the bike and rider that required lots of attention.
The whole Dark Eldar line shares the ultra-edginess and its not uncommon to see nice-looking models painted with attention given to only the edges. The model is spray painted a dark color like dark blue or black and then all the edges are painted with a very bright or white color; nothing else. If the lines are straight and even in thickness, they will look great on table. I just love to add fades so the hard-line-only option was not going to work for me, but even the GW staff painters have been recently and frequently using this style.
The above image is the last Castle model for the Confrontation-themed chess set I started ten years ago. The slow assembly is due to the fact that I usually paint one or a group of similar pieces in between the completion of one army and the start of another. This was the rare intra-army chess model. The previous one, the black queen, was completed back in October 2010, when the Eldar army was getting wrapped up. The only models remaining are the white knights. I'll probably won't get to those for a while. The Dark Eldar to-do list is still pretty significant. The below image shows the minotaur model and complementary Castle piece that was painted back in Feb 08. The hardest part about painting models in the same theme so infrequently is the color matching. I often forget what colors I used.
