Back in the Painting Saddle

Progress!
I have finally finished some more little pieces of lead! And when I say finished, I mean finished up to the final matt varnish application, hence the shiny gloss varish effect. There may also be some static grass to go on them too, only it's up in the loft and I'm down here. You'll get the idea though.

Skavenslave Standard Bearer

Back in the good old days a crappy skavenslave unit could expect to march into certain death  er, battle with a shiny banner to give them that +1 combat resolution that could get them to stick around for 2 entire combat rounds. Now they have to rely on steadfast whish is something I'm very skeptical about. The model is by Black Tree Designs, and not tooo bad. There is no banner per se as I intend to sculpt a couple of skinned cats to hang from the banner, thus giving the whole unit the fighting name 'The Cat Skinners'. I imagine I'll have that done sometime in 2017.

Clanrat with fat-tailed rat

 Next is an old Citadel Clanrat that I picked up off ebay for less than it's original cost (more or less) and not some grossly exaggerated price that some internet rip off merchant thinks he can get some poor saptitian to buy for £10 or some other farcical amount. I modeled a rat onto the base, you know the new kind with a huge fat tail that makes them ever so vicious (the rat not the Clanrat). All I have to do now is convince my opponents that an extra rat = an extra attack and  I'll be sculpting these things everywhere!

Packmaster with staff-whip

 What do you do when you buy 16 skaven standard bearers in a job lot of Stormvermin and Clanrats? Well this really, cut off the banner pole and make it into a whip. Voila! One less standard, one extra Packmaster. As I have way too many Clan Moulder gribblies in relation to their unpleasant overseers, I have managed to kill two birds with one stone. I sometimes even amaze myself!

Ratty Rat Quisher

As if painting up the 3000 or so unpainted figures I own isn't a difficult and time consuming enough task, why not make it harder by modeling rats onto various bases? This one had an annoying upturned left foot that was probably due to a miscast or me sitting on it. Either way rather than bend it back the simplest remedy was to model a slightly squashed rat on the base. A liberal application of Red Gore and Go Faster Red to the base and it look like he got caught trying to nab cheese from his bigger cousin! Not much else to say about the figure except it's probably my favourite from the late 80's range.

6 points of fodder

Three skavenslaves whose job is to die in a way that both amuses me and hopefully furthers the will of the Council of Thirteen. The first two are Citadel whilst the third is from Black Tree.

Clanrats A and B

Two Clanrats with their shields in their right paws. I like the thought of these guys deciding that swapping their shields to the other side improves their survivability (they are deployed on the right of the unit) whilst at the same time exposing the Clanrat to their immediate left in true Skaven fashion.

Gravestone shield

I suppose giving this Clanrat a name could make this paragraph more interesting but I'm not going to. Just one more body to add to the horde. He has a shield that was probably stolen from an undead army.

Man-thing  Axe-chop

Finally an old Citadel Zombie that is just going to be placed in my Skavenslave unit. Both arms have a few open wounds on them and hunched stance which suggests to me spending a long time in cramped tunnels getting bitten regularly by rats. Probably a captain from the Empire whose own unfortunate resilience and cunning has enabled him to survive in the hellish nightmare of a skaven lair.I have plans for about a dozen other non-skaven skavenslaves to go into the unit including a High Elf, a few goblins, a beastman and anything else I can chop up from my bits box.

So there you are, my first offering of the year to the paint gods, not overly spectacular but probably worth reading for the ridiculousness of me making up a back story for a skavenslave/zombie model. Who knows I might even write a short story about him.