A Tale of Four Gamers- Thar be rats!

The first month of the TOFG challenge is nearly done, and so are my units. First off, a stonking big block of clanrats. Some of my favourite monopose plastics here from at least 3 sets of AHQ (with thanks to Ross). In his seminal article the mighty Andy Chambers says he learned not to paint block units, and so I ignored his wise advice and did it anyway. There were some tough bits, painting belts on 61 identical rats was a low point, but it feels good to have got this largest block of troops out of the way early.

I've done minimal highlighting on these guys, allowing inks to do most of the work for me. After spraying grey and dusting with white I mixed up Army Painter Dark, Strong, Light and Mid Brown tone with some Vallejo Sepia ink and splashed it on the fur areas. Whenever the current ink mix ran out I mixed some more in from one of the bottles above, giving a variation across the rats. For a few red-hues I added some skin wash in. Then I split the rats into 6 different groups and chose 6 earthy colours to paint the robes of each group. Then swapped the colours around for the hoods. The belts and weapons were painted in then everything was hit with another wash of Dark and Strong tone. Lastly I did the homage to Andy Chambers in the dyed designs on the foreheads and eyes, painted the shield designs in black and white, did claws, teeth and muzzles, painted eyes light green and hit them with a green ink to give a glowy warpstone effect.

On the subject of glowy warpstone... I then got to tackle the poisoned wind globadiers. Starting with the same undercoat I used green inks around where the globes were shining, then used a blend of ink and paint for the robes, starting away from the green and blending into it. Pretty happy with the OSL effect. I wanted to keep the rest of them muted and neutral and decided that since they're clan Skryre they should be albino rats. The jewelled red eyes of their gas masks make a nice contrasting spot colour. The only thing I don't like about these sculpts is their tails which aren't that great even given GW's irritating preference for segmented 'worms' instead of proper scaly rat tails.

So that's the first 500 (519) points done. I think if I were planning to be super-tactical with my force choices I should probably max out my clanrat choices and rely on weight of numbers rather than going for the elite types, but since I'm not doing 60 clanrats every month for the next quarter of a year I'm sticking with storm vermin and black rats. Next month's challenge? Storm vermin and plague monks with their respective leaders, a total of 466pts.

Whilst on the subject of rats... here are the first three sculpts done from my dollies. They're not exactly 'slaves', I got excited about rats with guns, but the next batch will be more civilian and conscripted in their outlook.