Slinger 2: Sling Harder

Here is Verminkin number three.  He's basically the same as the last one, but with a bigger stabber.

You can't really tell, but this guy's actually got slightly lighter colored fur from the other Verminkin. I also like the way his leather helmet turned out.

The sling used the same method as the other one, which, again, was a huge pain, so this guy might be my last slinger for a while.  His sword is made from the end of one of the left over spear tips I had after making the slings.

Definitely have to figure out an easier way to make slings...

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...

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!