Lair of the Lagomorph

Back with more Skaven, this time the big cheese himself: the Verminlord!

Specifically I built the kit as the named variant Screech Verminking, and he is by far the tallest model in the army at 6.5in/ 17cm. Ever since this kit came out right at the end of the old world Warhammer I’ve wanted one, so it’s nice to finally have an excuse to buy and paint it.

It’s a fantastic model, but I found it quite daunting to paint, because of its size and the amount of detail all over it. I’ve been practicing techniques I knew I would have to use on this model on other models in the army, refining my big model skin on first the Stormfiends then the Hell Pit Abomination.

The skin was painted in multiple stages, alternating airbrushing and brush work to get a nice mix of smooth gradients and nice texture all over the model. The early airbrush work set the overall tones (darker reds below, light skin above), followed by layering and highlighting by brush in three stages, painting in detail where the model was a bit flat (painting the rings on the tails took some willpower!). Finally I used the airbrush again to add some more tones in, with some dark reds and purples to enhance the shadows. A final brushed on highlight took care of any areas where I overdid that last airbrush pass.

Overall I’m very happy with it, I painted it roughly over a week and a half, in a few paint sessions scattered over the period. It makes a nice centre-piece for the army.

With that, I only have a few heroes and a small weapons team left to complete my 2000pt list. Will I have the willpower to stick with this and see it through, or get dragged back to the North African desert or some other project entirely? I have no idea and will find out over the next few days!

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!

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!