Warhammer Fantasy Summer Campaign: Finally Painting My Army

This summer my local group decided we were going to play a campaign rather than little one of games. This led us all to creating or finishing armies to play with. I'll admit I have never finished an army until we decided to play a campaign. I usually play skirmish games that have 12 miniatures max. This was a good excuse to finally finish the Skaven army I started all the way back in college.

Right as Warhammer Fantasy was out the door for Games Workshop, I began to play. This led to many models going on sale but also made other models difficult to find. I traded 50 bucks and a giant Lord of the Rings miniature for two copies of the Isle of Blood boxset. A few of the miniatures were missing but it was more than enough to get started. This box has two armies, the High Elves and the Skaven. The High Elves had a very clean look with regal armor wearing blue and white. The Skaven had lots of tiny little rats holding weird weapons and I was immediately drawn to them. 

Through out college, I slowly collected more units with the little amount of money I had left over. My sister gave me my unit of Plague Monks for my 21st birthday and other units were found in game stores or online over the years. I ended up having a pretty sizable force that sat unpainted in a box for years. I carried them from college to moving back home to moving out to my first apartment. Once I moved into my totally own space, I knew that I wanted to finally paint all my rats. This campaign gave me the excuse to finally do it. 

Originally, I planned to paint the army as close to the box art as possible. But that is just not how I enjoy painting miniatures any more. I prefer punchier colors that create a mood for the models. Skaven are known for their love of warp stone. This gave me the idea of having the glow of warp stone blast the models.

I pulled out my color wheel and decided for most of the model to use complementary colors of red and green. First, I primed all the models black and with the amount of rats I had to paint, it took longer then I expected! Next I placed all the models by unit type to create an assembly line for painting. I focussed on having 3-4 trays of units at a time. This way I was not overwhelmed by the entire army and could complete groups of models at a time. The first layer was a dark brownish red, followed up with a bright red, then green and multiple layers of yellow. The yellow was primarily used on the face and other important focal points. 

Over about 5 days I managed to paint the entire army. Some days I was painting up to 8 hours a day. It was less that each model took a long time to paint and more about the sheer number of rats. At the time, I painted over 120 models but since then I have added some additional units. To see the entire army, check out my Instagram. 

After our first game, the group got together on Discord to work on our army lists for Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition. Using the Realms of Chaos books, I rolled a new character to add to my army: Thral Blackblood, Plague King. The rolls included a mace tail, Chaos spawn, multiple arms, manic fighter, strong, warty skin, and troll regeneration. There were alot of things to include in one model! 

The monster was brought to life using a giant rat miniature Mike traded me along with a number of bits from my bits box. The creature isn't oriented in the 'correct' direction on the base but we play by the rule of cool.

The next few posts will be summaries of our first few games! I might also include a lore post later down the line about my army and the named characters.