How to Paint a Skaven Warlitter

In my last post, I described the materials and process in scratch-building a Skaven War-litter. This time, let's look at how to paint it. As always, I'm not claiming to be a good painter! All my painting is just so I can get an army on the table that looks good from a distance.

On reflection, the Skaven Warlitter is actually made of 3 distinct parts:

1. The Skaven Warlord
2. The litter-bearers (crew)
3. The Howdah

As I have posted "How to Paint" guides for both the Skaven Warlord and Skaven Stormvermin before, this post will just focus mainly on the howdah.

Step-by-Step:

1. Assembly 

(see part 1: "How to Make a Skaven War-litter")

2. Undercoat

I use GW Chaos Black spray, but any modelling undercoat spray will be fine! I prefer Black to White as this is a more forgiving colour for beginners. Anything you miss during painting will just appear to be in shadow.

3. Basecoats

Apply basecoats to the model (See list below)

Note: I still have some of "old" GW/ Citadel paints lying around. If you aren't familiar with them, here is a conversion chart I made to match them up with "new" paints.

• Calthan Brown: Wooden planks, giant rats (fur)
• Vermin Brown: Wooden plans (do some planks with this colour, or other, lighter browns, to add some variety to the wood)
• Tallarn Flesh: giant rats (flesh)
• Knarloc Green: Standard/ Flag. Also any warpstone chunks (embedded in skull eyesockets)
• Ice Blue: Skaven Shields.
• Abaddon Black: Arrows (added later)
• Leadbelcher: Metallics - halberd blades, spikes, chains etc.
• Dwarf Bronze: Skaven icon, shield parts.
• Auric Gold: On edges of the Skaven gold icon on the front of the howdah
• Bleached Bone: Skulls, cords (attaching flag to flag-pole)
• Sunburst Yellow: Goblin shield heraldry.

4. Washes

The litter after washes

• Agrax Earthshade: All wooden parts, flag/ standard, bones,
• Nuln Oil: metallics (spikes, shield parts, chains, blades etc.)
• Ogryn Flesh: Giant rat flesh.

NOTE: After highlights and drybrushing (Step 5, below) I made and applied a rust wash using watered-down brown and orange.

5. Highlights/ Drybrushing

After highlights/ drybrushing/ edge highlights. e.g.
Goblin shield (top edge) chains, blades, skulls etc.

• Calthan Brown/ Skull White (80/20 mix): Drybrush raised areas of wooden planks and edges of wooden planks.
• Bleached Bone/ Skull White (80/ 20 mix): highlights on skulls, bones etc.
• Leadbelcher/ Chainmail (50/50 mix): Highlights/ edge highlights on blades etc.
• Calthan Green/ Scorpion Green (40/60 mix): Edges of warpstone chunks in the skulls.
• Tallarn Flesh/ Elf Flesh (50/50 mix): Giant rat skin.
• Calthan Green/ Skull White (50/50 mix): Flag. You can do successively lighter mixes on the raised area of the flag.

From a painting perspective, you are done with the Howdah at this point!

Litter-bearers/ Crew:

As mentioned above, paint these as you would any Stormvermin (guide to mine here).

After painting, they should rank up and look something like this (ready to balance the howdah on top.)

Not ranked up, they can be used as normal, and look like
they are just carrying spears and clubs.

Ranked-up, and ready to lift the war-litter.

The final touch to the litter-bearers (if, like me, you don't want to glue them together or glue them on to a base) is to magnetize them. This will make it easier to use and move them when they are carrying the war-litter. I use magnetic sheet for this, as you an see in this tutorial.

Stormvermin, showing magnetic sheet attached to tray and bases.

Hope this is useful!

In my next post, I will look at how I made the 28mm arrows that you can see on the finished war-litter.

(EDIT: here is a link to "How to Paint a Skaven Warlitter")

Cheers,

How to Make a Skaven War-litter

What self-respecting Skaven warlord wouldn't want to ride into battle on the shoulders of his minions, elevated above the common ratmen and the enemy? 

The Skaven War-litter allows your warlord to do just that...

...not to mention also being an easy way to add some extra attacks, increase your warlord's armour save AND keep his "look out sir" roll.

How do you get a war-litter? 
At time of writing, you have to build one yourself. However, it is actually not too difficult, and the materials are probably in your bitz-box already. Additionally, there are lots of good examples on the net that you can draw inspiration from. 

In this guide, I'll lay out what I did to get a war-litter ready for painting. Also, I'll show you how you can kitbash the litter and bearers so they can still be used separately (in other words, you won't lose x4 litter bearers by gluing them to a war-litter that you might not always want to use.)

Ready?

Building the War-litter - gather your materials!

Howdah:

Plastic sheet 1-2 mm thick. (I used leftover GW movement tray material, which is 2mm thick.)

• Floor: x1 (30mm x 37mm)
• Side walls: x2 (20mm x 40mm)
• Front wall: x1 (20mm x 30mm)
• Rear wall: x1 (20mm x 30mm)

Optional: front wall "trophy panel" (optional): x1 (20mm x 20mm)

TIP:  For speed and convenience you might want to use a material that is thinner and easier to cut than GW movement tray...

Decoration:
x1 Skaven Warlord (sold separately - I use the Island of Blood Skaven Warlord)
x1 Flag (Stormvermin unit flag works well.)
x5-6 shields (Skaven shields are great, but a variety from different armies works well.)
x12 Spikes - to decorate the walls and repel boarders (I used old Goblin spear tips, but any old swords can be cut down)

Optional: x1 -2 giant rats (Skaven players often have these left over from their sprues)
Optional: Chains and skulls (Chaos bits?) 
Optional: x2 halberds and chain to make a weapons rack inside the war-litter.
Optional: x2-3 arrows (more about making those later!)

Litter-bearers:
x4 pre-assembled Skaven Stormvermin with halberds (I prefer them to Clanrats, but the choice is yours!) 

TIP: The halberds you want are held in their right hands (on their left as you look at them). Do not glue them onto the bodies yet!!

Assembly!

Front and right side (Click to expand)

Left side (Click to expand)

Right side (Click to expand)

The difficult thing here is not the litter itself, but actually the litter-bearers. Let's look at them separately later.

War-Litter.

1. Score the plastic to simulate "grain" in the wood. Before gluing everything together, you will want to score the plastic to make it look like wood. To do this, take a box cutter and run the blade down the plastic vertically. Don't do everything evenly. You are trying to create a "plank of wood" effect.

2. Cut the top and bottom of the walls to simulate "planks". Cut the edges of the panels so they look random, and like planks of wood.

3. Glue the war-litter. Glue sides, front (and optional "trophy panel") and rear to the base.

4. Decorate. Glue optional decorations into place around the walls (e.g. chains, spikes, shields, rats, flags, weapons rack etc.)

5. Add arrows. Glue/ drill arrows into place.

TIP: When adding the arrows, think carefully about the angle and positioning. Would they stick "straight" out of the wood, or angled up (more likely, if they had come as a volley from long distance).

The howdah is not ready for undercoating.

Litter-bearers.

1. Assemble x4 Stormvermin bodies on bases, without their right arms (on your left as you look at the model.)

2. Cut away/ file down the shoulder armour/ shoulder pad on the Skaven where the arm will be glued until the arm will fit closely to the body with the arm pointing up and with the halberd haft horizontal (parallel to the ground.)

TIP: Before gluing each arm, carefully eyeball the arm and halberd hafts so that you glue them on straight...
They don't have to be perfect, as you won't notice it when they are on the table, but you want the halberd hafts to line up horizontally when the litter-bearers are ranked-up, as shown in the images below. 

Notice how the halberd hafts line up.

3. Glue arms into place.

4. On the front two troops, cut the halberd blade off where it meets the haft. Then glue them to the opposite end of the haft (Glue blades towards enemy), so they are now pointing in front of the model. Remember - pointy end at the enemy!

5. On the rear troops, cut the halberd off where the blade meets the haft. Save these two blades (or stick them on the front of your war-litter as I did!)

6. Glue modeling sand to the base in preparation for undercoating.

So, you now have the assembled war-litter and litter-bearers.

What you will find is that by pushing the bases of the bearers together, the hafts of the halberds should roughly line up, allowing you to balance the howdah on top...

TIP: Do NOT glue the howdah onto the litter-bearers at this point, even if you intend to glue it later! That will make painting the litter-bearers almost impossible...

In my next post "How to Paint a Skaven Warlitter", I'll go into detail about the colours I used.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments!

Cheers,

Finished Skaven War-litter

Here is my scratch built Skaven War-litter. 

Fit for a king...
...Or at least for a Skaven Clan Warlord! 

The War-litter on the move! Spikey!

True to the Skaven ethos, it was made from scrap (spare bits) from my bitz box over the course of a couple of days. In gaming terms, it seems like a pretty good way to add some protection and power to the standard Warlord (an additional x4 WS 4, STR 4 attacks from the litter bearers and +1 armour save).

In a future post, I'll outline the process I took, but for the moment you can see that fortunately I had lots of access to spikey stuff in my bitz box!

Four of the strongest Skaven Stormvermin carry the litter into battle....

The walls are reinforced with shields. Rusty spikes are
attached to the walls to dissuade the enemy from climbing aboard.

The litter-bearers aren't glued, so they can still rank up
and be used in a unit if I am not using them to carry the litter.

However, put the litter-bearers together and they rank up so that the
litter can be balanced on top of them.

I magnetized the crew and their movement tray, so when they carry
the litter they are stable and easy to move.

War-litter team leader sez "That ways - go that ways!"

Detail of the weapons rack...
(easier to see with the warlord removed!)

I tried something new for this project, which was making my own 28mm Black Orc arrows. I wanted to stick these into the outside of the war-litter. I think that creates the effect that it has been under attack or is in the midst of battle.

I'll add a "How To" to the blog when I can!

Cheers,