Seb's Skaven Painting Tutorial

A Painting Tutorial by: Sebastiaan B, a true devotee of the council of thirteen and clan Pestilens!

 

Welcome

Welcome to the paint-your-furry-friend tutorial! Your basic clanrat. You probably have dozens of them sitting in front of you, all eager to be painted, so the object of this tutorial is to give you an idea how you could make them look good without spending hours on one miniature.

All my regular models such as rat ogres and plague monks essentially follow the same steps. Ready? Here goes!

Georgeous Grey-Seer



Preparation

1. Clip the clanrat out of its sprue with clippers and use a little hobby knife to erase the last traces of imperfections as well as the mold lines (just scrape them off as it were). 

2. Glue all components of the clanrat (body, weapon, base, shield) together. I prefer to paint the shields separate while they are still on the sprue and clip 'em out later and stick 'em on when both the model and the shields are nicely painted.

3. I use $3 resin glue on the base and drag the model through some hobby sand. A little tip here: while Games-Workshop (orrather, Citadel Miniatures) have great products, most things like sand, clippers and hobby knives are overpriced, so you can often find cheaper alternatives. I do swear by Citadel high quality paints and all the paints I use are from their range.

4. I use some old-fashioned mat black Krylon spray paint that I picked up for a few bucks at Walmart to undercoat the model black. I always used black. If you forget to paint something that is hard to reach (which since you will be painting these miniatures fast, might be the case), such as armpits and the like, they will be automatically black/shadow. 

5. If you have a movement tray prepared for this unit, spray it black, too!

Painting stage 1: base coating

1. I usually paint 5 or 10 models at a time and then line 'em up on my movement tray. The first colour I use is Calthan Brown from the Foundation range. I use it to paint the front and sides of my movement trays and all the fur on my rats. Don't be overly neat and take a long time, but as with every step in the stage, please make sure you cover 100% of the area you do want to cover. I also use this brown on all the shields.

Notice how with the hands I paint an area after the wrists brown as well, the same going for our snout and ears. The 'inside' of the ears I also make sure are definitely Calthan Brown.

Clan rat with spear and sheild

2. In this step we will 'recover' a bit of those brown areas on the hands, ears and snout with Tallarn Flesh from the Foundation range. Since you negotiate the proportion of brown-pink in the hands and snout, the line will be different for each of your Skaven and look natural. Also don't forget to paint its tail pink. Some people like painting the feet pink, too, but I'm not too crazy about that.

3. Now take Dheneb Stone from the Foundation range and use it to paint the teeth and any horns sticking out as well as any 'bandages' if you will. On higher point-value models like plague monks or heroes or something, I will also use it on toe- and fingernails. 

4. If you're like me and you'd like to give your clanrats a sickly Pestilence colour, I can think of nothing better than Gretchin Green from the Foundation range. Use it to paint all the robes green. Again, as with all the layers, try to be fast and at the same time cover everything. Since we will be using washes later on, it's okay if you went a tiny bit over a brown area with this, for instance. These are 4 point models, you want them to look fun to play with/against, not for them to win a Golden Daemon, right??

5. Then use Boltgun Metal from the regular Citadel paints on all metal objects such as necklace-pendants, the hand weapons and the tip of the spears. I also use it on the shields. 

6. Take your Snakebite Leather from the regular Citadel paints to paint any purses and robes around the waist and so on.

7. Use Scorched Brown from the regular Citadel paints for the staff of the spear or the hilt of the weapons.

8. I use a now defunct colour called Bronzed Flesh to drybrush the sand of the base. A decent alternative is Vomit Brown from the regular Citadel paints. 

9. Finally I use Calthan Brown again to paint the sides of the base. Don't worry if the paint doesn't cover everything in one go, we'll give it another layer later on. You're done and are ready for stage 2!

Stage 2: Washing

Clan rat, with a dirty Spear

1. This stage is very simple. When your models are dry, and if you paint 5 or 10 at a time, the first one will be dry, it is time to wash them. No, don't put them in the tub (although, being Skaven, they could probably do with a good scrub), but get your Citadel washes out. I prepared a 1:1 mixture of Thraka Green and Devlin Mud. This will give your model the sickly green hint as well as shade it with the brownish colour. It's brilliant. Apply the wash liberally onto the model and shield. 

2. I personally like to use just Devlin Mud  for the sand on the base. 

Note: the rat in the picture was made before I created my mixed wash, what I did was use Thraka Green first and when that was dry, do the entire model with Devlin Mud. I found the result too dark, so I created the mixed wash, which I like very well. It's also a lot quicker!

3. If you want to, you can stop painting now. You should have a very nice rat model if you don't want to put more time into your massive units. I do this for my slaves, but I give my clanrats some more attention. If you're like me and you are willing to put a little more work, join me for stage 3...

Stage 3: Highlighting

Weapon Team with a small conversion

1. Step by step we will use a highlight for each of the colours in the previous stage. Go and find your Vermin Brown from the regular Citadel paints range. Drybrush all the fur -- as well as the metal from the weapons -- with it. Use Blazing Orange from the regular Citadel paints to drybrush the metal part of the weapons again. The point is that some part of the weapons will be boltgun coloured, others brown and others even orange. This creates a nice rusty effect.

2. Mix 1:1 Tallarn Flesh and Elf Flesh and highlight the snout, tail, hands and ears. I personally like to add a bit of water so the mixture is light and not too strongly contrasting. I highly recommend you learn how to blend. Essential what you do is apply a colour on top of another, like we're doing here, and use some water (e.g. old-fashioned spit) to drag the edge of the new colour out over the old colour area, so that you get a nice transition going on. If you do this, your models will greatly benefit and not look like a 10-year-old painted them. 

(Please forgive me if you are a 10-year-old and keep on painting!)

3. For the whiter areas, I used a dab of Skull White for the teeth and horns and Bleached Bone from the regular Citadel paints for the bandages here and there (including for instance whatever is underneath the spear tip). Again, I slightly water them down so the transitions are a bit smoother than they would otherwise be.

Three of the 8 Rat Ogres

4. For the green I use nothing more than the original Gretchin Green that we used earlier to highlight the robes. Here your blending techniques will be most useful. I give emphasis to the bottom part of the robes and then sort of drag the colour upward. This gives a natural look to the clothing I find.

5. Back to the metal. Open up your Mithril Silver from the regular Citadel paints range. It will give a nice contrast to our dark (and washed) Boltgun Metal. Now highlight the edges of the armour, any spikes, the metal on the shields and the tips of the weapons with this. Also be creative and create some 'scratch marks' on the armour by tracing small lines across it. That is where it has been hit by other swords or claws or whatnot! With the rusty weapons, also be a bit creative. The silver will show where the weapon was most corroded, so I used it to emphasize the orange areas of the blades/spear tips.

6. I generally do not highlight leather areas, but for more 'prestigious' models I will use another layer of Snakebite Leather.

7. I also do not highlight the brown from the spear shafts. Leave as is.

8. The base is good as is. Apply another layer of Calthan Brown to the sides of the base. You will find that while applying the wash earlier, you'll have spilt a bit of wash on it. 

Battle Standard

9. For nuts like myself, I enjoy painting eyes. It's fairly simple if you get used to it. My recipe for eyes is a horizontal line of Chaos Black in the eyes sockets. Then  I will draw another horizontal line of Skull White (for humans) and a thin vertical line of Chaos Black. For Skaven, I use a similar process, except instead of Skull White, I will use Blood Red to give them that demonic character. Once you've painted hundreds of eyes, it'll be as easy as beating "PaintBard" in Warhammer. Since it doesn't take much time and will let simple non-painters oooh and aaah at the exquisite detail of your models, I always paint the eyes. Gives the model a bit more character.

10. You might want to add a Skaven rune to some of the shields. I used Blood Red for mine, possibly highlighted with Blazing Orange.

11. Lastly, I flock part of the base, by creating two patches of glue on it (nominate areas in which the sand may not have stuck superfluously for instance) and dragging the model through some Scorched Grass from the Citadel range. As mentioned earlier, you can probably get some cheaper flock somewhere else, but I have now done a few hundred models and am still on my first tub of Scorched Grass, so I'm not crying over a few bucks that I misspent.

Afterthoughts...

I hope you are not crying either over your time misspent while reading this tutorial. You can use it for all your models. For rat ogres I suggest you wash the flesh areas after you highlighted them with Ogryn Flesh, as they will look rather horrible otherwise. For Plague Monks I gave their hoods a darker green colour, e.g. Knarloc Green from the Foundation paints range. The rest of their robes remain Gretchin Green as ever. Enjoy and feel free to leave questions and feedback!

A Box of obviously Cared for rats!!

Seb.