I mean, it's kind of unavoidable, isn't it? Some time or the other this topic just *has* to crop up... so, someone asked in a recent message how other people do it... here's my approach.
When GW switched from the old to the new paints and paint pots, I discovered a paint called "hawk turquoise", whose colour I liked and which I bought at once, whithout having used it ever since. So, now that I had bought my first Eldar ships, I thought it might be the right time to open that pot...
I assembled the ship and put it on the base (and it was really easy to assemble, due to some brilliant sculpting and forethought on the side of the sculptor; may he be thanked!), whashed it with alcohol to get rid of whatever might be sticking to it, sprayed it with black primer and then tried the trick shown in the rulebook, namely applying just a really thin coat of white primer, cause I wanted my ships to look a bit dark, and yet I wanted to bring out the details and the colours.
Then I put on a coat of hawk turquoise and washed it over with a great amount of blue ink, let it dry, drybrushed with hawk turquoise again, using a big drybrush. After that I thought I might just do the usual drybrushing and highlighting, using several shades of blue, leaving the centre of the sloping front hull quite dark and concentrating on the edges and so on; especially all those raised domes deserve a good deal of highlighting!
The technical bits, namely the gun barrels and such, were painted just like ordinary bone (white, brownwash, bleached bone, white drybrush/highlight), creating a very Eldar look. By now I had spent several hours over my model, because I had got quite caught up in the process, having applied at least half a dozen different shades of blue.
That was the point at which I noticed that my shadow looked very much like the Eldar ships featured in the last WD (Pirate prince Carter's fleet etc; by the way, did anyone notice the Eclipse cleverly disguised as a Shadow by the cunning prince????), only a bit darker and much more shaded due to the large amount of blue ink. I really liked the result, though it was meant to look turquoise rather than blue...
After that I just went for it and painted the sails red, apllying a good red wash, drybrushing again etc...
The most beautiful model I've ever painted.
The last touch was to put an Eldar rune on the base (the same one as on the side of the ship; I don't know what it means, but I found the same one on one of my friends wraithlord-decal-sheets). Looks very neat.
I guess now I'll have to paint some imperial transporters to prey on them...