Flames! Flames on the side of your face!

Last Wednesday, I decided to bring Skaven to the RTT over the weekend.  I’d rather be playing my Empire, but fully painted at a tournament > not fully painted at a tournament.  I jiggered together a list of what I had that I could run painted and, out of fear of having trouble with Ogres, replaced my eternally-disappointing Poisoned Wind Mortars with Warpfire Throwers.

Of course, even though I’m pretty sure I have something like eight or nine (not kidding), I didn’t have any painted.  So that’s what I did late last week.

I only spent about two days painting them: Wednesday was prep/assembly/priming.  Thursday was painting Friday was staying up late, painting and wishing I were less interested in the Steam Sale.

Here are the results!

I used the Island of Blood models instead of one of the metal ones because plastic > metal and because I’ve found everything in that box paints up lickety-split.  I didn’t want two identical models, though, so I tweaked them a bit: I removed the smoke plume from one kit and left off the flaming rat from the other.  It doesn’t show in any of the pictures, but I drilled out the smoke stack and both nozzles.

In some ways, I’m pleased with them.  I like painting Skaven.  It feels like home.  They look alright, and really did well the next day.

In other ways, though, all I can do is look at the things I think I did wrong or ran out of time to do.

  • That stupid damn flaming rat.  Not only did it make it hard to paint the model, the flames look terrible.  I hate going back to models, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to go back and fix those ugly, horrible flames. Hate them!
  • I think I did the brass / steel items wrong on the flaming device.  Does anyone else struggle with that particular decision as much as I do?  The contrast is always really important, and here, I think I got it backwards.
  • Part of that’s because I wanted to do scorching on the nozzle.  If the nozzle had been steel, that’d be easy and it’d look really good.  Because it’s brass, I don’t think it’d look as good.  As the green flaming rat testifies: it’s better to not do than to do and have it look like ass.
  • Too late, it occurred to me that I should have painted the drudge rat lugging the tank like a Skavenslave instead of a Clanrat.  Damn, that would have worked really well.

On a related note, I had that Lundbye painting printed off on some tablet-sized cardstock so I could take some glam shots of Empire models I paint.

I think it works well: though I do need to hit it with some varnish to cut down on glare.

Finally, while photographing the Demigryph (again), do you know what I noticed?

THE SPIKE ON HIS HEAD BROKE OFF.

Seriously.  It’s such a huge damn issue with the Halberdiers, you just don’t even know.  I’m so utterly done with pokey shit breaking off of my toy soldiers.


(Did you see how I just brought it back to fire? Full circle, folks. I don’t half-ass it ’round these parts*.)

* Yes, I do.