Target: Skaven

Showing posts with label Skaven. Show all posts

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Time for a few more rats

The thing about a Skaven army is that you can never have too many rats.

With this in mind it is time to add a few more furry criters with pointy sticks.

Nothing too smart or original, but I am keeping with the army colour scheme, so on masse they should look OK.

Monday, 14 November 2011

Is this wysiwyg enough? Engineer with Doomrocket

There is a very simple tactic that can be used with a Skaven Engineer. Look, I will admit it, it makes me feel a little dirty, and no, I am the first to admit it, I learnt about it by reading a forum, not by careful study. However after being mind-razoured more times than I can count, it is time to embrace the cheese..

The play works like this...

Equip a Skaven Warlock Engineer with a doomrocket. It will cost you only 45 points!

Start him within 12" of a Grey Seer.

Turn one, use the skitterleap spell to place the Rocket carrier to the side of the Enemy's line and fire using only 4 dice. The rocket will go 14" almost every time, drops a large template which causes S5 hits. It will pay for itself almost every time and almost never misfires!

The rules ask that my figures are wysiwyg as much as possible and so to counteract the cheese, I thought I would make the figure as obvious as possible.

To achieve this I took a clan rat with spear and added a rocket from the crew of the Empire Helstorm rocket battery. I added a small length of guitar wire as a fuse and fixed a torch from the Empire flagellant set with the end of a paperclip. There you have it, one Engineer with rocket.

I had a slight spot of bother when I tried to mould the plastic of the flame over a naked flame. It all started to melt and turned to mush, but I think I have got away with it on the finished model and it holds it all in place.

The lit rat comes from the IoB warpfire thrower.

The lit fuse was enhanced by two pieces of static grass fixed to the end to represent the light. Bit of a happy accident, but goes OK. Hope you enjoy...

Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Skaven gutter runners, better when painted

Last time I had started to paint two units of five gutter runners. Since then the paint brush has been put to use and I now hove two units complete with movement trays to show off...

I built the bases so that I could easily move them around on the battlefield. It is simply a piece of plastic card with foam card built up on top then based in the normal way.

As with all of my Skaven these are painted in the Clan Septik, with the colour of the outfits matching the respective rank or status. These are low ranking, so are quite yellowy/brown.

The rest is fairly conventional. Hope you enjoy.

Monday, 7 November 2011

Skaven gutter runners: A start is made

Next on the list of desirable Skaven (if there is such a thing) are a unit or two of Gutter runners.

Who could resist the chance of having a couple of units of vermin complete with slings and poison running around creating mayhem. Well not me for one, the scout rule alone is sufficient reason, just to mess with the thinking of my opponents. These cheeky chaps follow the conventional approach of clanrats with the slings bitz pack. Not difficult and it works very well.

So far I have assembled the boys. You should spot a couple of the actual gutter runner figures in amongst them. looking back I don't think they add anything and I would have been better off with the clanrats entirely ...

I then blasted them with undercoat. I almost always go with black, beacuse I am convinced it goes on better and you cannot tell the difference when you have finished.

I have started the process of painting, by adding on the basic colours. As the remainder of the army, I have elected to have darker rags for the lower order rats, so these boys are going to be pretty shabby...

Friday, 21 October 2011

Rat Ogres, and then there were four

When last I played with the Ratogres, I had three painted and one assembled. I guess it is time to finish off the last of this bunch..

This Ratogre is the model with the most conversion elements on this pack of figures.

The ratogres left hand is the giants hand from the giant model. This needed the fingers changing into claws. To achieve this I cut out the plastic from blister packs to make long nails.

The Arm had to be repositioned and raised to make this work. This left a massive hole in the ogres back.

Careful filling and that was resolved.

I painted the human captive to match the empire army I have and the ogre to match the remainder of my Skaven army.

Hope you enjoy

Tuesday, 30 August 2011

Rat Ogres; and three is a crowd..

To make the rat ogre get-togethers slightly more awkward I have added a third...

This model required very little in the way of conversion. I just filled in and smoothed over some of the skin markings. sometimes it is nice to just do womthing a bit simple. Hope you enjoy...

Thursday, 18 August 2011

Return; complete with a Rat Ogre

It has been just over a month since I last blogged. For this I am sorry. I blame a combination of intense overwork, nice weather, two new kittens and some limited success for England at the Cricket.

For those that don't know cricket, it is a quintessentially English game, whose rules are best summarised as;

1. There are two teams. One out, one in.
2. The team that's out try to get the player that's in, out.
3. When they do get him out, he goes in.
4. Then the next player goes out. As long as he's out, he's in.
5. The object is then for the team that's out to get the second player out. When they get him out, he goes in.
6. This process is repeated for each innings until the team that's out gets the team that's in all out.
7. When the whole team is out, the team that was in goes out, and the team that was out goes in.
8. Then they play a second innings until they're all out. Except one player. He remains not out.

But it rained today, Cricket was stopped and I had little else to do but update the blog....

Some time ago I prepared a small number of rat ogres and last month I actually blogged the first of the finished chaps. Now it is time to show and tell with the second..

The conversion work on this young lad was pretty minimal. I repositioned the head so that it pointed forward (I was worried that if they all looked at their shoulders it might suggest either a poor masseuse or excessive in breeding). I also removed the symbol that was carved into the flesh of the animals back and got rid of quite a bit of the stitching that joined the various body parts together.

The painting heavily emphasised the skin colour. The hair texture was painted on as i thought I would be able to achieve a look of finer (or even thinner) hair this way.

Hope you enjoyed, more to come soon (unless it stops raining of course).

Saturday, 9 July 2011

Skaven Muscle: A finished rat ogre

When last we saw the skaven Rat-ogres they had been, assembled, converted and filled with green stuff. The nest step is to slap on a bit of paint. So that is what I have done with this young lad. Nothing too strange going on here, but I have cut off his hand at the shoulder strap and turned his arm around so that it is extended.

This resulted in it sticking out a bit so I added some chains and stuff off a chaos marauder. I also had to cut a block under his left leg because the chain would have been dragging on the floor..

I went for a skin tone and overall I am quite happy with him.

Off to paint a second..

Thursday, 30 June 2011

Rat Ogres: a time for muscle

It was time to consider what was missing from the Skaven force.

Clanrats: check
Weapon teams: check
Cannons: check
Wheel thingy: check
Big muscular things with tiny little heads: d'oh!

Ok, it was time to whip out the Island of blood sprues and play with what lies within. With little clanrats, no-one is ever going to notice if you have two identical rats; with rat ogres it is a different matter and their were only two poses in the box set. Solution: out with the saw, hobby knife and green-stuff and roll up the sleeves.

I still have a few spares left over from a giant kit I used once, so I took the giant hand holding the human and sliced it onto the upraised arm of one of the rat-ogres. The problem with this is that the giant has nails whilst rat ogres have claws. The solution I went with was to cut plastic off a blister pack and fashion what I could. The other chap has his head repositioned so it points forward. That looking at your shoulder thing just did nothing for me.

For the guy who had both fist pointing down, I decided to cut him at the elbow and have his arm pointing forward. This looked a little daft, so I added some chains and skulls from marauder horsemen. The remainder of the messing about was bending and reposing of limbs. I had to raise the guy holding the chains because they were dragging on the floor.

Next up was to add some putty. Lets face facts all of the shoulder joints are pretty rough and need some work. The remainder was making my poor cutting and joining look a little less rough.

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Skaven Warp lightning cannons: Two, because one is just not enough.

Last time I posted I was desperately trying to work out how to paint the inside faces of the frames. If only I had the advice of the blog-sphere and painted the beast before I assembled it.

Another problem area was the green shaft of the cannon barrel. I managed to paint some lightning bolt effects, but it would have been a lot simpler if I had painted before assembly. The remainder of the painting was relatively simple, but I had not realised just how much metal-work details there was to paint.

The wood colour is my go to combination of scorched brown, drybrushed bestial brown. Edge and prominent wood grains are carefully picked out in vomit brown and then a mix of Vomit brown and fortress grey. I then place a few washes of various colours before picking out the significant grains again.

Clicking on the pictures should give larger versions.

Since the cannon crew are just used as wound markers, I have fixed one to each of the cannons and then based up the remaining four.

All of the Skaven in this army dress according to their relative status. The cannon crew are very low ranking and so have a very dirty looking rags. The clan rats have a beige rag outfit and characters wear white.

I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Monday, 20 June 2011

Skaven warp lightning cannons on the workbench

My Skaven force is toy heavy..

I guess that that reflects my approach to playing Skaven. It might not follow the current meta game, or perceived wisdom on how to win, but it does make the game great fun. It is not unusual for me to kill more of my rats own than my opponent..

So this is reflected in my approach to the warp lighting cannons. Two is the maximum I am allowed, so I start with two!

There are times when you just dive into a model project and then only hit the blog-sphere when you hit problems, This is one such project.

If I had taken the time to look around the blogs, I would have known that painting the warp cannon first before assembling is the only sensible way to go. As it was, I discovered, like dozens before me that if you assemble first, you need a gynaecologists skills to paint the details on the insides of the frames....

Never mind, lesson learnt...

I built in a very conventional way. Although the very upright construction may help me spot every enemy, it just does not look right. The Engineer in me screams out that it will just topple over after the first shot.

The crew are just there as wound markers now, so I will fix one crew member to each of the machines. The remaining four I can fix to bases. If the chariot base was a little bigger I would consider a nice little diorama, but no options are available with such a large footprint on the cannon..

Thursday, 16 June 2011

Skaven Doomwheel; completed

When last we looked at the progress on the Skaven doom-wheel I had painted the two large wheels, but had not pulled anything together.

I was desperate to create the impression that this machine was not only travelling at considerable speed, but was also a little out of control!

The original idea was to have the wheel flying through the air after climbing a take off ramp in the form of a shield of a terrified opponent.

However, when I started building this together it was obvious that the base was never going to be big enough to let this arrangement fit on the base and enable it to be used in a game. The wheel would simply just hang off the base far too far. I changed it to have the wheel hitting rocks and bouncing into the air, but now it is assembled it looks like the Engineer is trying to pull a wheelie, which is much cooler and doomwheel like...

A whole was drilled into the smaller wheel, which then sits on a paperclip, which passes through the base and loops on its underside. You can see the top of the paperclip projecting upwards through the rocks on this photo of the unpainted base.

I originally started painting the rat that came with the model as its assistant driver, but I was just not happy with the look of the model. It was just far too static for a fast moving model like the doomwheel.

I would much rather have this rat hanging on for dear life. This meant that I had to make a rat from scratch. To achieve this I took the body of a night goblin and added a right arm, tail and two legs off the clan rat sprue.

The right arm is that of a goblin archer, with half a bow.

The flag was attached last, just before I mounted the assembly onto its base. It was a little rushed because I was hoping to take it to tournament the next day. Accordingly I am not that pleased with it and I may have to go back one day to revise this..

The intention was create the look of speed and to reflect the crazy - devil may care nature of the Engineer and remainder of the crew. I believe that I have achieved this, I hope you do too.