Sunday, December 29, 2019

Pack Rat

A converted Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and pack.

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.

Mordheim Night Runner converted from Blood Bowl Gutter Runner

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.

A WIP Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and 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. 
 
A WIP Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and pack.

A WIP Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and pack.

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

A WIP Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and 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.

A converted Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and pack.

A converted Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and pack.

A converted Eshin Night Runner for Mordheim with kamas and pack.

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.