Sculpting a Custom Skaven Hero: Eskrat Brightclaw

 So recently I've been really into sculpting miniatures from scratch, and after some warmups decided to take the plunge and make a hero Skaven character! I'm really excited to sculpt more humanoid miniatures in the future, and this is the first of these.

I wasn't able to get a hold of much green stuff - my local store is clean out - so I decided to use oven bake clay. I tend to use this often for miscellaneous bits because it cures hard but flexible, and it's wildly cheap and abundant at the craft store. But the only foray I've done in character sculpting with it is with the Artillery Biovore and the Ripper Swarms, both of which are non-human-like creatures with low detail. Anyway, here's a teaser final shot of it for fun.

I started with some generic Skaven sculpts to practice and warm up - the intent was to use these as Stormvermin. I was surprised how much I progressed in skill (even if yeah, the later ones are still a bit rough) over the course of a day sculpting. I enjoyed myself, able to add more details to each subsequent model. I painted these up (after priming with mod podge, the oven bake clay is really hydrophobic and needs something for paint to grab onto). While I do really like how they turned out, I could see myself getting a real Stormvermin kit and relegating these guys to background roles, like Plague-Claw Catapult duty. But they're really charming lil sculpts, full of that retro kitsch.

Once I felt satisfied with those, I turned towards coming up with an original hero character. (As always) I've been reading the 28 magazine, and thinking about narrative possibility. I'd love to run some sort of narrative game with small amounts of models, maybe using a non-GW rule set but with a similar feeling setting. So I started with the visual design first, drawing inspiration from a cool pickaxe I found and Kobolds from World of Warcraft. You can tell it's low fantasy, because there's candles on the character. My partner got me some nice markers recently, and the gray one is great for shading. I had a lot of fun doodling a bunch of ideas, and ended up with this.

From there, I started sculpting. My method was pretty straightforward - someday maybe I'll do a tutorial or something - where I sculpted limbs onto a wire armature. I baked this once I got the pose down, and sculpted on top of that hardened clay. I could also carve the clay back if needed, while it was still firm, which was really helpful. I built up the body and pickaxe separately, intending to join them together at the end. I also had a lot of fun with the chain-mail skirt, that was from a tutorial on pinterest. The hardest part was probably the hands, but unlike previous sculpts I managed to do miniature (if comically oversized) fingers on the model, which was a new achievement! So here's the final sculpt, I forgot to take pictures of the process.

I had to do some image editing to make the detail actually visible. Photographing red is hard.

Then, I got to painting. It required many thin coats, since the clay really likes to show through the paint for whatever reason. Unlike my Bloodwake Corsair Skaven, I went darker than usual, both to highlight the candles and also to make it seem like he was perhaps underground in a cave. I also built up a slightly more scenic base to continue that idea.

I used the Anvil of Apotheosis tool and the Warscroll Designer tool (which I think might be slightly out of date) to make the Age of Sigmar Warscroll for my custom character, name Eskrat Brightclaw. I gave him a bit of backstory and a hook - he wields a massive Warpstone pickaxe and covers himself in candles because he's afraid of the dark (though will never admit it, and would kill any skaven who accuses him). I have absolutely no idea if he's balanced at all, but I had a lot of fun and I felt he had a niche in being something that can destroy terrain, breaking it apart with his pick.

Whew! After all that, I'm still excited to sculpt more original characters, and hopefully run them in a bespoke game sometime! Thanks for reading

- Miss Captain Bear