Skaven Stormfiends ready to join the fray

Wow I can't believe my first year blogging about this crazy hobby has come around. Time flies and all that. Perhaps I should've planned something interesting for the first anniversary...ah well next year (maybe). Today I finished my three Stormfiends, equiped for fire and close combat.

My team of Stormfiends is ready for battle. Finishing these three incidentally opens up the opportunity to start fielding the different Clan Skryre Battallions.

I should admit that I really did not like these models when they were first released. Come to think of it, that is a bit of a recurring thing that happened during the end times. New model came out, I did not like it and now it is painted in one of my display cabinets (looking at you Neferata and Blight Kings (trying not to look at you Nagash still in box)). I guess in part it was just the shock of seeing something bigger than a rat ogre appear and the guns in combination with GW's paint job made them look a bit more suited to the 40K universe. When you do start to think on it, they are a logical addition to any Skaven army. Clan Moulder can grow huge monsters (Hellpit Abominations) and Skryre allready had all the guns fitted to these in their arsenal (warpfire throwers, poisoned wind globes and rattling guns).

I had a lot of fun following along with this painting blood tutorial on Tale of Painters for the effect on the doomflayer gauntlets.

For my army I wanted the unit ready for close combat. The concept of a steel armored monstrosity with whirling blades and a pair of gigantic crushing mace-hands (doomflayer gauntlets) works for me. By the way on the back of each of these big monsters is a weird unprotected little brain-Saven that apparently controls it. I forgot to take a proper picture so here is a bad one.

These small Skaven seem to be in control of the larger ones in some way, although I do wonder how they can see what's going on.

I wanted my second Stormfiend to have another pair of doomflayer gauntlets but unfortunately the box only contains one pair of these. Also a bit of a pity you  get three Stormfiends, but each can only be constructed in one of two ways. So the first is either equiped with doomflayer gauntlets or shock gauntlets, the second has either warpfire projectors or windlaunchers and the third gives you a choice between ratling cannons or grinderfists. You also get no choice in heads and the dynamics poses up the difficulty for head swaps.

Making a second close combat Stormfiend from a single box requires a blatant unwillingness to follow instructions.

Being a bit of a rebellious sort I decided to glue the shock gauntlets to a different model. It actually worked quite easily and I think it looks ok. I had some real fun applying a glowing green warp-electricity paint job to this model. Again with a new technique for painting warpstone, this time I painted a Vallejo Heavy Green base. I wet-blended this it up to GW Moot Green. Then I took my airbrush and (over-)sprayed multiple thin layers of Vallejo Fluorescent Green over the areas. I finished of with a very thin dash of Vallejo Yellow Green on the tips of the gauntlets (and adding a few stripes to the warpstone shard).

Is there such a thing as too much warpfire? Please step closer to my projectors to find out. 

The last of the three models is equipped with warpfire projectors because there is no such thing as too little warpfire (assuming your the Skaven, I suspect opposing forces have different opinions). Luckily this time I actually remembered not to glue the armor panels to the Stormfiends (and to the warpfire projectors) making it easier to paint some proper metallics. I rather like the result although I should actually go ahead and rust the armor of the electric Stormfined and the fiery one (like the one with the crushing hands), but I don't want to. So I'll assume Crusher is a veteran and the other two are brand new store-bought.

Finishing off these three brings my total Skaven to paint to 10 Stormvermin, 1 Packmaster (Skweel Gnawtooth), 1 Rat Ogor and my second Doom-Flayer. I did have an interesting battle versus Dwarves on Saturday. After slowly rolling to the other side of the battlefield my finished Doom-Flayer quite nicely murdered a handful of grumbling Longbeards. That motivates to get the second one painted up too. You can, after all, never have too many nasty warmachines as a Skaven player.