Gnawholes

I’m getting rather quite close to having finished my 2000pts of skaven, so the last stretch motivation is kicking and and I painted some more models for the army tonight: the gnawholes.

These are terrain pieces you can place as a Skaven player after the gaming table is set up. They are effectively magical tunnels that allow your Skaven units to pop up in fun places, such as right behind enemy units.

It took me a long while to get around to painting these models, I just really struggled to get motivated. I knew I was going to have to paint them in sub-assemblies as all the scaffolding is intermingled and it would have been hell to paint fully assembled. However I really dislike painting in sub-assemblies and often put off models where I just have to do that. These models also live in a weird space for me, they’re terrain but also part of the army in a way, so I couldn’t decide if I should paint them like terrain (i.e. quick and dirty), or army models (a bit more care involved). In the end I split the difference and went for somewhere in between, taking a bunch of shortcuts to make sure I could paint them in the one evening.

This mostly meant relying on the airbrush as much as possible, dry brushing where it made sense, and some fairly harsh highlights where it didn’t.

At the end of the day I’m happy with them, they look quite cinematic with all the glowing and fit nicely next to the army. I’m down to characters (including one that is probably the largest model in the army) and a little weapons team, so overall not too much more to go to get these all done. This is just as GW have announced a new Skaven army book which might require me to update the army – oh well!