Skaven Slinger

The second henchman is now finished.  I decided to give this guy a sling, since having a whole unit of Verminkin flinging rocks can be pretty handy.  Back in the day, Games-Workshop used to sell sling arms for upgrading your models.  After modeling a few myself, I wish that I'd invested in a few of them. 

The sling turned out pretty well, though it's a bit on the large side.  I was mostly concerned with making it solid.

The sling arm is a Clanrat spear arm.  I actually left some of the shaft, which runs inside the sling, giving it some structure so that it's not just two thin strips of green stuff sticking up in the air.  It's solid enough that I can grab the model by the sling without worrying, so I guess it paid off.  Still, not doing a whole unit of these unless I come up with a better method (or track down some of those old GW sling arms).

On to the Henchmen...

Here's the first of the henchmen for my Mordheim warband.  Skaven don't get a lot of options for henchmen.  I might eventually convert an Eshin Rat Ogre, and giant rats would be good to have on hand since there's a spell that can summon a few, but the only option for actual henchmen that gain experience and use equipment is Verminkin.  As such, I'll be churning these guys out for a good long while.

In order to make these guys seem like the bottom rung of the Eshin hierarchy, I decided to convert them all out of Clanrats with very minimal changes to their overall posture and silhouette.  Basically, every one got a black cloak and a second hand weapon in his left hand, and that's about it.  This one got a nice Katar-style push dagger in his left hand, which turned out rather nicely.

The dagger was made from the sword of a Vampire Counts skeleton, I believe.  I wanted to make it look like it was lashed to his hand with bandages, which I made with green stuff.
  

Since I was just going to drape their cloaks over them without a lot of dynamic movement, I decided to try normal greenstuff capes.  They were pretty easy and turned out alright, though the ends of the cloaks by their feet were still far too bendable.  I ended up giving them a coat of Mod Podge before painting, which gave it a bit more stiffness, almost on par with a thin piece of plastic.

As a prototype, I'm pretty satisfied with this guy.  I'm still slow when it comes to both painting and converting, but I for the most part, this is a fairly straightforward formula that I should be able to repeat.  Since these guys will probably be used as Night Runners in a normal game of Warhammer, I'll eventually have to make even more than the twelve or so that I'll need for a maxed out Mordheim warband, so efficiency is a big plus.

I've got a long way to go.

Mordheim Souvenirs

My second Night Runner is all ready to go, which means that I finally have all six Skaven heroes finished.

Like my other Night Runner, this guy got stuck carrying the baggage for the rest of the group.  He's in charge of carrying the loot that the warband acquires, though he seems to be more concerned with grisly souvenirs and trophies than items of any actual value.  I decided to arm him with a pair of hook swords, which seemed to go well with his vicious appearance.

Definitely got a thing for bones.

This model is converted from a standard Clanrat.  I straightened out his posture a bit to make him stand out from the Verminkin, which I'm also converting from Clanrats.  Combined with his oversized pack, he ended up looking like a hulking figure next to some of the other models, despite actually being the exact same size.

I guess he does have pretty beefy arms for a Skaven.  I got them from one of the Beastman sprues.

The hook swords were fairly complicated constructions.  The main part of the blade came from one of the Clanrat spears, but the rest of it had to be built from plasticard.  The crescent blades on the hand guards were particularly difficult.  I ended up making them using a standard hole punch, then filing them to give them an edge.  I had to punch a million little partial holes in that sheet of plasticard before I was actually able to get two of the right size that matched.

Got a nice assortment of skulls and bones from a variety of different models.  I especially like the ork jaw that he strapped to the top of his pack.

I used the same Milliput and green stuff blend that I used on the other Night Runner to make his cloak.  I think it might have turned out even better on this one, not that much of it is visible with his huge pack.  Since there were already plenty of skulls on this model, I decided to decorate his base with a bit of fence from the Banshees sprue.

My two Runners turned out a bit different than I had originally imagined, but I'm pretty happy with them.  I'll probably just use them as Gutter Runners in a normal game, though they might stand out a bit from the rest of the unit.

Now that my heroes are all finished, it's nothing but Verminkin from here on out.  And since a Skaven warband doesn't max out until it hits twenty members, this is going to take me a while...