Skaven Warp-Walker

 Look, I made a regular Skaven Warp-blaster! ...Wait, that's not what they're supposed to... oh no. Well, I've gone off the rails again.

Here's a quick beauty shot for the thumbnail.

This one was really fun, I was inspired heavily by Matt Ross's Skaven walker kitbash. (I rehosted it because Instagram sometimes won't let you preview it without an account, all of the credit to him for the model and picture). I originally found it in his and Trent Miscast's book "Minifreaks", which I would highly recommend, it's a beautiful collection of inspirational and terrifying and beautiful kitbash models. 

But I was like - wait, I also want it to be piratey. A pirate mecha, perhaps. So I broke out the hot glue and the bits and the popsicle sticks and started whacking away at things. I was very much inspired by "Metal Beard" from the lego movie, and also the Necrofex Colossus from TW:WH3. Wow, yeah - two very different tones. Anyway. 

For a minute, I thought I was going to have a mast up top with some sails, but it was already way to tall, so that didn't stick around. It would just have broken off all the time.

The legs took a while to get right, I actually tore them off twice and started over. The key was the buttons and circular gubbins with wire wound around them, giving them a much more "rope and pulley" feel which made it less steampunk and more Skaven-made. Skaven-punk? That thing.

The driver was there from the start, but I went back and forth on the canopy. It's supposed to be an upside-down boat hull, painted to look like a rat's face. I'm not sure if either of those come across, but it makes for a fucking iconic silhouette, so I kept it.

Then it was off to painting. This one was a doozy, because I didn't keep it in parts. So many careful jabs of snaking the brush into a crevice, praying I don't smudge something else on the way out. Lots of rusty metal and drybrushed rotting wood. Then I went back for a bunch more passes. Weathering, smearing, lots of algae. I also added on a bunch of strips of tissue painted green and pulled downward, to give even more of a "dripping from the ocean" effect, like kelp had gotten tangled in it as it walked.

Finally, I added little helper rats on the back. Those I did paint separately, thank goodness. One's a failed print of one of the Mordheim boys, another is a Reaper Bones "giant rat". I have a third one to add in, but it's not in the pictures right now on account of being stolen by a rambunctious kitten for a week and then hidden under the oven. Took forever to find it. Anyway, there's supposed to be three rats back there.

Well, thanks for reading!

- Miss Captain Bear