Warmaster: Skaven Wizards and General

The last of the Skaven (for now!). The general and 5 Wizard stands. The General is a Grey Seer with 2 undead rat ogre bodyguards (it's obviously supposed to be Thanquol). The wizards are 1 Grey Seer (Masterclan), 2 Clan Pestilens, 2 Clan Skyre.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Heroes

Heroes?!?! More like villains. These are the real leaders of the Skaven army. With the Screaming Bell nearby, their command is equal to the Generals.

The 2 in front are from Clan Verminous, the middle 2 are Clan Moulder, and the last 2 are Clan Eshin. If you look closely you can spot old Warhammer named characters. I'm fairly certain I bought 2 command packs long ago, so I have enough heroes for 3,000 points worth of Skaven.

I also played with my camera settings a bit and got a less dark picture (although it constantly wants to switch back to the default which is pretty dark).

 

Warmaster: Skaven Warp Lightning Cannons

A unit of warmaster skaven warp lightning cannons. Same basic paint scheme as all of the other skaven warmster stuff I've painted recently.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Screaming Bell

The centerpiece of the army. It's the Skaven Screaming Bell. It's usually surrounded by hordes of ratmen.

I got a new phone, and the pictures seem to be a bit darker.

 

Warmaster: Skaven Army

Now for something a bit different. This is all the Skaven Infantry I have for Warmaster. It's the bulk of the Warmaster miniatures I own, which comes to about a 1200 pt army. I still need to paint heroes, the screaming bell, and 2 warp lightning cannons. At some point, I plan on picking another 1200 pts, which should make for a truly epic army.

Warmaster miniatures are fairly easy to paint. Contrast makes them even easier. 12 of the stands I painted 15+ years ago, and just touched them up (did another layer of highlights, redid the bases with a darker edge color). Another 15 stands I had undercoated dark brown and followed my previous plan to just do drybrushes and highlights to finish them off. The last 9 (the Rats & Rat Ogres), I started with Wraithbone primer and used contrasts (and Agrax) to darken them, followed by highlights to bring them back up. The contrast does a great job of capturing the miniatures details. You can see the fur on the Rats and Rat Ogres. The last 9 came out significantly better IMO. Stylistically you can somewhat see the difference. Moving forward, I'll use the contrast method.

There's a ruin I also printed on the 3d printer and test printed. I've since printed a few more. The rats need to live somewhere.

From front to back: Giant Rat Swarms, Jezzails, Rat Ogres (left), Clanrats (right), More Jezzails (left), More Clanrats (right), Plague Monks, Gutter Runners, and the lone ruin.

 

 

Man O' War: Skaven Fleet

Hide the round pastries! The Pie-Rats are coming!

It's a Skaven fleet for Man O'War. These are all (except the dead fish thingy) 3d printed using files found on Thingiverse (credit to Nathan Hunt at https://www.thingiverse.com/barnebiss2/designs).

I have a PLC extrusion printer (~ $100), which is not the ideal type for printing things at this scale. I hear resin printers are better (and more expensive and slightly more difficult to operate). I hit some consistent flaws in the prints. Namely the bells on the Doombringers and the wrecking balls on the Deathburners. Anything with significant overhang. This is more due to my incompetence than the designs, but where my 3d printing inexperience failed me, my conversion experience came to the rescue. They were not too difficult to fix. I used some left-over morning star bits from my Chaos Beastmen (for the wrecking balls) and/or greenstuff (for the bells). I also never got a good print of a mast, so I made my own using thread and some polystyrene rods. As with the Dwarves from before, I still don't have access to a color printer to print out the sails/banners, so these are currently banner-less. Overall, it's about 1200 pts (not including the dead fish ship from Dreadfleet ... which should probably be about a 300 pt ship ... so 1500 total).

Color-wise I put the base colors down and hit the whole thing with an agrax wash (i.e. liquid skill), then hit each areas with specific highlights. The colors: Wyldwood Contrast sides (highlighted with Deathclaw), Blood Angel Red Contrast roofs (highlighted with dragon fire red), Guillamen Flesh Contrast light wood/ropes (w/spot highlights of ushabti bone), Runefang Steel metal (highlighted back up to Runefang Steel), Retributor Armor gold (w/spot highlights of Mithril Silver). I based them all using Flames of War Medium Bases spray painted with a satin blue (Cornflower).

I think they came out pretty good for 3d prints, and should look even better once I add the banners.

 

Shadespire: Spiteclaw's Swarm

Spiteclaw's Swarm from Shadespire. Painted them dark/grey/black (vaguely Eshin like). I think the highlights on the armor are a little stark, I should have used some leadbelcher to ease the transition from leadbelcher+agrax to ironbreaker.