Category: AoS

I recently acquired another glass cabinet a little larger than my existing ones to display some of my bigger projects all in one place. One of the armies that was placed within was the Skaven I’ve been working on for a little bit. There are only a handful of models left to “finish” that army and seeing them in their grey plastic next to the rest of the painted models motivated me to make some more progress. So behold in all its gruesome glory, the (extremely appropriately named) hell pit abomination.

What a fun model, absolutely covered in details and generally very abominable. It’s been a while since I painted a large monster, let alone an almost entirely flesh coloured one. It was a challenge to keep that much skin visually interesting without going a bit mad painting it all.

The skin being the major feature of the model I wanted to concentrate on that first then go in later for the rest of the details. This allowed me to use some rather messy techniques to get the bulk of the work done and then clean up after myself.

I started by airbrushing on a zenithal undercoat (black all over, followed by light grey from the top), followed by an all over coat of GW Guilliman Flesh contrast. This looked pretty terrible so I followed up by airbrushing some purply magentas from below, and Vallejo Elf Flesh from above. That ended up looking much better so I let everything dry for a few hours and came back in with oil paints, doing a wash of some reddish brick colour all over with some areas darkened with navy blue oils. This was wiped off the raised areas with some makeup sponges, and gave me a nice canvas to work on. A few more hours of drying and I was able to start brush highlighting using GW Bugman’s Glow, GW Cadian Fleshtone, and GW Kislev Flesh where most appropriate (having already created some nice gradients I just used the paint from the list above that matched best, sometimes using two or all three). The rest of the model was relatively quick after that and was completed in a couple of sessions.

As you can see it is holding a fish, which isn’t on the stock model. I pinched an arm from the GW river troll kit for this detail, it fit in there with only minor filling required which was nice.

This was a fun project, and allowed me to play some more with oils which is a tool I’ve been introducing into my painting for a while now and really like. That’s a little less grey on that shelf, with hopefully the rest to come soon!

Back with more Skaven, this time a bit more bulky than usual! These are Stormfiends, combinations of Skaven technology and their ability to make really big rats!

These are quite imposing models, and it’s been a while since I’ve painted something this big that wasn’t a vehicle. I quite enjoyed painting the skin as a result and while I still kept things fairly loose and rough, there are a few more steps on these than I did on the other Skaven models.

There is also a lot more armour on these than on anything I’ve painted for the army, so I really got to push the mottled brass look I’ve been doing. This was done as per all the other models but I think shows off the effect in a bit more detail.

Remaining for the army are a few characters, but also two big monsters which will require me to apply some of the learnings I got from painting these models. Should be fun!

After quite the foray into historical subjects, it’s time to get back to my Skaven project! This time the last block of infantry I’m planning on painting for this version of the army: the elite Stormvermin. From now on it’s characters and monsters! Not to say that I won’t paint more infantry in the future however.

I still think of these as the “new” plastics, but they’re fairly old now. Still, very cool models and I really enjoyed painting them. Nothing new from a colour scheme point of view, but to befit their elite status I decided to have all the cloth on them as the teal colour rather than the mix of cream (read dirty white) and teal I have on the rest of the infantry.

I also spent longer on these than I did for the rest of the infantry. They got a few extra highlights to make them pop a bit.

As a nod to the Old World I painted their fur white, which marked out the Stormvermin that served as the bodyguards to the Grey Seers in the old Warhammer setting.

Finishing these has motivated me to keep going on the army, so barring other distractions there should more posts on them soon!

After my foray into 1944 armoured warfare, time to come back to my Skaven project! This is the second unit of clan rats for the army, and the last I’m painting for the first 1000pts. I haven’t quite decided if I will add more as I grow the army, it will likely depend on how much I feel like painting more of them!

There isn’t much to discuss painting wise, I followed the guide I wrote for the first unit pretty much to the letter, the only exception being that I replaced the basecoat of the teal cloth with Scale 75 Arphen Jade. I’d used Lupercal Green on the first unit but found I didn’t get very good coverage over my ochre undercoat.

I’m not too far from having painted the 1000 point list, just needing to paint two characters and a unit of 20 stormvermin. I’ve been getting excited by all kinds of games lately so who knows if the next post will be more Skaven or another distraction!

With the new edition of Age of Sigmar coming out in the past few months, I wanted to start a new army, specifically one that was not at its core just a rebasing of one of my old Warhammer armies. So I went about GW’s catalog to look for an army that inspired me. At about the same time I started planning the follow up campaign to my recently finished Icewind Dale Dungeon and Dragons campaign which had been going on for the last year. We decided to try out the newest Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay edition, and I set about to refreshing my memory of the old world by listening to Warhammer audiobooks while painting. The Gotrek and Felix audiobooks have turned out to be excellent, with great voice acting and plenty of background colour I could use in the campaign. More relevant to this post though, is the abundance of Skaven antagonists in these novels. The descriptions of the Skaven and their machinations, mistrust of each other, and readiness to blame others for their failures makes for very fun storytelling, and of course, made me want to paint some.

I’ve actually had these models painted for a few weeks now, but was waiting on the basing materials to arrive in the post to finish them. These 20 models were my guinea pigs (lab rats?), and were used to find a scheme that would satisfy two criteria: 1) look good on the tabletop, 2) be quick! My current plans for the army involve 100 troop rats (80 Clanrats and 20 Stormvermin) and I don’t want to spend the next year painting them.

In the same vein, I wanted the basing to be quick so I decided to try out the base ready range from geekgamingscenics.com, specifically their Grimdark City Rubble. My aim for the bases was to represent Skaven tunnels, which I picture as dark earth and broken supports, which I made out of balsa wood, stained with brown and green inks.

As with my previous armies I made a record of the paints used so I can refer to it as I continue painting the army (a useful precaution against becoming distracted by another project and forgetting how the early models were painted!).

Overall I like the look of these and am happy with how long 20 took to paint. I have a 1000 point list in place and am playing around with how to expand it to 2000 points in the future. Painting on this army continues and I should have another post on it soon.