The Coven of Verminlord Skrax - Painted Models Part 6

The Venoms I am especially proud of, as I discovered a simple and effective way of painting a rusted metal look on the engine and thruster parts. It's simply a basecoat of Mournfang Brown (mixed with a little Agrax Earthshade to improve flow and make sure it gets in all the nooks and crannies), then when that's dry, you drybrush heavily Leadbelcher overtop. That's pretty much it! I've seen a similar effect done with very careful weathering and pigment powders, but I was so pleased with the experiment that I stuck with it on all of them. I wanted to keep the Dark Eldar look of the real Venom parts as is so it really looks like the rat-engineers were really only interested in salvaging and souping up old Venom wrecks.

The Coven of Verminlord Skrax - WIP Venoms

These are my take on the venoms that the wracks will be tooling around in. They were inspired a little by that blog article I linked, but I wanted them to be made partially out of real venom kits, so they can be easily recognized by other players, but looted. I had to draw a fine line between Orky looting and ratmen looting. The way I saw it is these creatures actually have an understanding how the technology works and care about performance, rather than cobble a bunch of junk to it and hope it works. So these 3 venoms were wrecked from a previous battle and the Haemonculus Sigcourax had his smartened rats try to get them working.

Some of the lighter bits are from various Mantic kits that I got from bits sites, parts that I figured could look good. Luckily I was right. The pilots I am especially proud of. They are the little brain-rats that mount of the backs of the Skaven Stormfiends. When I got a stormfiend kit, I found they were a perfect fit and looked the part inside the cockpits. The smaller large-brained rats would have heightened reflexes and know-how to operate the advanced flight craft that are Dark Eldar vehicles. The flags are from the Clanrats kit, and of course the weapons are true Dark Eldar splinter cannons.

A quick note on the flying bases. I found this youtube video, and fell in love with the idea. I have always hated the flimsy flying stands for the vehicles, and these are really tough. I have since done this flying stand method on all my Tau vehicles as well.