Pack Rat

After real life completely wrecking me for several months, I finally managed to get back to my Eshin warband.  First up is one of my two Night Runners.  I decided that someone in the warband has to carry all the gear and loot and it didn't seem like the sort of job you would entrust to your bumbling henchmen, so it seemed like a good job for the bottom-rung heroes of the party.  As such, both of my Night Runners are wearing overladen packs.  I probably went a bit overboard, but you can accumulate a fairly decent pile of weapons, trinkets, and other things over the course of a campaign, so it works.

This model is based off of the Blood Bowl Gutter Runner.  I removed the cape and the head, repositioned the tail, and gave her a head from the Plague Monk sprue.  I think one of the arms is from a Clanrat spear and the other is the arm from the Warp Lightning Cannon crew that holds the telescope.  The rest of the telescope can be seen strapped to the pack.

I did a fair amount of experimenting on this model.  I've always had trouble with greenstuff cloaks being to soft and bendy to work unless they're pressed tightly against the model.  For my Night Runners, I tried mixing in some Milliput in order to get some rigidity.  It actually worked quite well.  The Milliput cured fairly hard, but the green stuff prevented it from being super brittle and crumbly, which often happens with small, exposed details.  It also dramatically increased the curing time, which was a bit of a mixed blessing.  It was workable for hours, which was handy, but it didn't fully cure for over a day, which is a problem when you're adding more layers of putty on top of it. 
 

I did quite a bit of rummaging through my bitz box to get all the gear for the pack.

As I've often mentioned, I'm pretty obsessive when it comes to pinning on fiddly bits on my models, but for some reason, I decided that I didn't want to go through the trouble of pinning the kama to the tiny handles.  This ended up being a big mistake, as I ended up breaking them off at least two or three times before I actually got the model painted, so in the end, I was forced to pin them after all.

I'm pretty happy with the end result.  I definitely made this one much more complicated than it needed to be, though I did actually simplify it a lot from my original concept.  Guess I'll have to spread some of those ideas around to other models.

...And Another.

My second Black Skaven is now finished.  I gave this one a naginata, which will simply count as a spear in Mordheim.  As with the other Black Skaven, I decided to make his cowl green to give a bit of color to my black-clad Eshins, as well as to give something to differentiate them from my Adept and Night Runners (which I have yet to make).  Green is also the color of my Skaven army, so if I ever manage to actually finish it, this will help to tie my Gutter Runners into the rest of the army.

 

The base for this model was the Festering Skaven from Spiteclaw's Swarm.  This one has the most dramatic pose by far, so I really wanted to make use of him (and I'm tempted to think of a way to use him again).  I like that they actually modeled another character using tail-fighting skills, but I thought that the dagger as well as the end of his tail were a bit thin and flimsy looking, especially in contrast to Snikch's tail, which looks thick and muscular and is wrapped around his blade several times.  By comparison, the Festering Skaven's blade looks like it's tied to a thin piece of string and floating gently in the air.  So as much as I like the idea of a tail weapon, I decided to remove it from this model.  Maybe I'll try to make my own later.

Like my Assassin Adept, I used a Myrmourn Banshee to make his long, tattered cape.  Since his arm is sweeping out to the side with his naginata, I wanted his cape to look like it had been tossed across to his other shoulder, hence using the smaller, thicker banshee bit.

As usual, I tried to add some Mordheim imagery to the model, such as keys...

...and skulls.

Again, I didn't want my Gutter Runners to be quite as pale as my Adept, so this guy got a slightly darker, healthier skin tone.  I ended up adding a lot of very pale highlights in the end, but I think the final result turned out rather well.

I've now only got two more heroes to go, though I'll still have to make a huge pile of Verminkin for this to actually be a playable warband.  Still, quite pleased with the first little bit.

More Ninja Rats

The next member of my little band of Skaven Ninjas is finally finished.  Since the background fluff for Clan Eshin is that they learned to be sneaky assassins by watching actual human ninjas, I wanted my Mordheim warband to actually use as many traditional Japanese, Chinese, and Indian weapons as possible, instead of the mostly European weapons that come in the kits.  So here is the first of my two Black Skaven, armed with a Kusarigama, which will count as a sword and buckler.  Conveniently, the rules for sword and buckler in Mordheim are actually quite well suited to a Kusarigama, as the double parry is a pretty good way of representing the use of the chain to distract and entangle your opponent.

In keeping with my theme of pinning ridiculously tiny bits together, I decided that I needed to pin the blade of the kama onto the handle, just in case.  I don't think it was quite as bad as trying to pin the Horror arms, but the bit I was pinning was so small that you can actually see the pin through the thin layer of plastic that was left after I drilled it out.

 

The body of this guy is actually from one of the original plastic Night Runners that came in the Mordheim box.  I liked the little row of throwing stars on the bandolier across his chest and by sticking the Night Runner body on the newer Clanrat legs, it gave him a bit more of an upright posture, which I wanted for his pose of raising the kama above his head.

The chain was definitely the most difficult part of this conversion.  I wanted to make it as solid and stable as possible, which I sort of achieved.  The chain is cobbled together from a number of different lengths of chain, mostly from Dark Eldar bits, as I recall.  The main chain going from the handle to his left hand is made up of at least two shorter lengths of chain, but I have it kind of tucked below his head, so that it's hopefully not in a position where it could get caught on something or that the model could fall and land on this bit.  The last little bit of chain with the weight is a bit more flimsy, and I definitely broke it off a few times and had to re-glue it to the model.  In retrospect, I probably should have tried to find a longer bit of chain that would have allowed me to rest it on the ground, but if it breaks off in the middle of a game, I may end up doing that anyway.

The cape comes from one of the Blood Bowl Skaven models, though I hacked at it a bit to make it look a bit more distressed, though this fellow definitely has one of the better kept capes in the warband.

I made some cobblestones from green stuff to try and match the basing on the other models...

...and of course, the obligatory skull.

I also just realized that it's now been slightly over a year since I started working on this guy, which is kind of sad, but at least that's a marked improvement from the twelve years it took me to finally finish my Sorcerer.

Hopefully the rest of the warband will be coming along soon!

Skaven Assassin Adept

Here's the leader of my Eshin Warband, my Assassin Adept.  Clan Eshin has always been a bit lacking in models, and since I was never a huge fan of the old metal Gutter Runners, I was pretty much stuck with just the Night Runner sprues that came in the Mordheim box for building all the characters in the warband (though to be fair, they were probably the most versatile models in the range at the time).  Although I like the new Skaven plastics much better than the old, huge-fisted 90s models, none of the Eshin models have been updated, so they look even more out of place now.  Fortunately, a couple of the models that were released with Spiteclaw's Swarm look very Eshiny with a few tweaks.

I know some people who do a lot of converting aren't a fan of the new snap-fit easy-to-build models, but I actually really like them for conversion work.  It's true that you end up with a lot of weird pieces, like a head and an arm, or a partial torso, so simple head swaps are usually out of the question, but since I usually end up having to chop things apart and pin them to make them fit anyway, it's not a big deal to me.  Plus, even with pieces sawed off, the models do still usually fit together so tightly that I probably could get away with not gluing them.

As you probably guessed, I used the Lurking Skaven as the base for my Adept.  I had a pair of old 90s fighting claws that I've been saving for this conversion, but since he already came armed with a pair, I didn't have to do anything to his weapons.

I often used the capes from the Night Runners sprue to differentiate characters or Gutter Runners from the rank-and-file Night Runners, though they never really looked that great.  They were a bit square and tended to stick straight out like someone had used too much starch on them.  I experimented a lot with green stuff capes, but even using some wires for support, they were always a bit too flexible when they weren't draped over the hard plastic body and I could never quite get the sort of flowy shapes that I wanted for a character that's leaping forward like this.  I needed to use something that was rigid and had plenty of detail.

In the end, I went with the lower half of a Myrmourn Banshee, another excellent snap-fit kit.  The only downside is that the part that attaches to the torso is pretty thick, so I had to file it down until it was a shape that would fit over my Adept's shoulders.  I also bent the cape a bit using a heat gun so that it didn't stick straight up and make the model like five inches tall.

I found a plastic clanrat sporting a cowl and sawed off his head to replace the more armored one from the Lurking Skaven.  I then connected the cape to the hood with some green stuff.  I also added some keys to his belt, because everyone in Mordheim carries keys.  I probably should have also had him carrying a fish, some candles, and a marionette or two, but I guess I'll have to save those for some other models.

I tried to give him a more pale, sickly skin tone than my other Skaven, as well as kind of a grimy look to show that he'd been lurking around the ruins of Mordheim for quite a bit longer than most of the members of the warband.  In general I think it worked pretty well, though the contrast between the pale highlights and the dark grime that settled more in the recesses might make the shadows look a bit stark.  Still, he turned out pretty well, and much better than anything that I could have managed a few years ago before the Warhammer Underworlds and Nighthaunt models came out.  Now Games-Workshop just needs to release some actual Eshin models and we'll see what I can really do.

Mordheim Eshin Sorcerer

Since my Morker mob is finally finished, I decided to switch gears into Mordheim.  First up is my Eshin Sorcerer.  This conversion has actually been a long time in the making.  His arms are from the old metal Horrors of Tzeentch.  I bought them from Games-Workshop back when you could still buy bitz directly from their website, which would mean that I started working on this guy back in...2007?  I don't think it was the initial inspiration for this conversion, but it was certainly influenced along the way by Nordic's Eshin Sorcerer from his old DeviantArt account.  As I recall, my original plan was to use a Plague Monk body, but I'm glad that I decided to go with the Empire Wizard instead.

I had to carefully cut and pin the Horror arms to get them to fit properly with the Wizard bitz that I was using for the body.  This ended up being ridiculously hard, as the spindly little arms were only slightly larger than the wire I was using to pin them.  It would have been a shame to have held onto those bitz for over a decade, only to end up ruining them in the process of trying to stick the whole thing together.

I left his right side unattached while I was building him, since there was a fair number of little fiddly bits inside his cloak that I would never be able to paint once he was completely assembled.  I got the hood courtesy of Cygnus, which I elongated to fit the Skaven aesthetic.

 
The scythe is actually from one of the ornamental bits on the Vampire Counts Coven Throne, which worked rather nicely.  I did have to carve out a slot for it between his arm and his shoulder, but once I did, it fit nice and tight.  His base is cobbled together from a couple of chunks of rubble from the Assault Marine sprue, along with some greenstuff brickwork and the obligatory skull.

The cloak on the Empire Wizard looked much to starched and smooth for a Skaven that's been crawling around in the rubble of Mordheim for months, so I carved in some rips and tears and sculpted a few more folds and wrinkles to break up the smoother areas.  I actually hollowed out the entire bottom of the body so that the feet and legs would go up inside the robes, not that you can really tell on the finished model much.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with how this guy turned out. Definitely worth the twelve year wait.  Now I just need to see if I can get another fifteen or so models finished in less than 180 years...