Goonhammer Reviews: Sylvaneth Grove Guardian Model

Hey there! With another round of AoS releases comes a new model for the Sylvaneth, those favourite tree people of ours. In this case, the Grove Guardian, a even more literal walking tree and her entourage of happy bug friends!

We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with preview copies of these models for review purposes.

Grove Guardian. Credit: Rockfish

Design

Sylvaneth tend to fall under either the tree people or ghost elf archetypes and this is definitely the former, with the lower half of the guardian being an ambulatory tree trunk blending into a dryad like form above. I think it’s a pretty neat model with a ton of dynamism and interesting textures in the flowers, and while you are relatively limited in how many different textures there are but that’s not particularly a problem given how well they all fit together. If anything this can be a bit of a relief given AoS does tend to lean towards the very detail and texture dense side of things!

Construction

Ok, so I have to be honest that this was a pretty frustrating build. There was a consistent theme of awkward fitment and unclear contact points throughout the model, and unfortunately it's in a way that's rather hard to ignore. There’s rather a lot of little bits that don’t quite want to stay in place, some of the flower bulbs are particularly notable for this, but the main issues are all around the tree trunk that makes up the majority of the model. There are rather a lot of pieces that go into the trunk and they are… vague with how they fit together making it difficult to figure out how to get everything to fit and inevitably resulting in at least a few gaps in the model. I don’t have a lot of great suggestions to help there either, just go very slow and careful on this one and consider looking into gap filling techniques.

Painting

Fortunately, most of the painting is straightforward and I had a decent amount of fun with this model, well for a while. Sadly we can’t ignore the encroaching horror that is basing this model. I usually fully assemble my models and it’s typically fine, but not when it came time to apply texture paste or the paint that followed. With that complex root system and collection of bug buddies this model is pretty gross to try to get paste on without mucking up the model itself, this is easily avoided by simply leaving the model off the base and attaching it later at least. I didn’t think that far ahead, but you can!

You'll notice in my final pictures I went pretty aggressive with my application of bushes and tufts to hide the places where I wasn't able to avoid mucking up the roots, and that can work well but is at risk of altering what the interpretation of the model is. A tree with too many leaves at the bottom and very few up top looks a bit off after all!

Final Thoughts

Grove Guardian. Credit: Rockfish

Well, I am a bit on the fence about this model, you can enjoy painting it for sure but it’s not something I’d recommend to do early in your modelling and painting career just due to the risk of frustration and mess. I can’t speak to its gameplay utility, but that would probably be the deciding factor for me as to if I’d want to pick it up or not. This is better then it might sound at first glance, because I've definitely encountered models where I'd refuse to build them if at all possible (necrons have a few infamous models for example) and mostly just means that you need to go in being aware of the issues the model has.

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Tags: age of Sigmar | Sylvaneth | aos | Model Reviews