It was my dad who painted all the miniatures for our games back in the day. With a white spirits filled egg-cup and enamel paints left over from his model aircraft days, he'd somehow paint entire sets of models in a single evening while I was in bed. I'd come down in the morning and find them lined up on top of the TV or on the sideboard.
He painted all of the miniatures from Heroquest (including the furniture), Space Crusade, Battle Masters and Advanced Heroquest. And he did that so quickly that we could pretty much start playing with fully painted models right from the start. That's quite an achievement in my book, and it added a lot to the enjoyment of the games.
His paint palette from those days also continues to inspire my own painting style. Limited as he was by the colours he had available for military aircraft and 1:72 scale WW2 infantry, orcs ended up with olive drab skin and dull muddy brown tunics. And... they looked great for it. Of course, he was more or less following Mike McVey's painted examples around the sides of the box, but my dad's orcs in particular, with their dull colours and darker flesh looked proper mean and evil, dirty and filthy like they should be.
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| Warhammer Quest orc archer, inspired by my dad's colour scheme. |
Above you can see a recent-ish painted example of a Warhammer Quest orc which I painted in a similar set of tones to my dad's original models. Note the clear ancestry of this miniature descending from the Heroquest orc figures. Except that instead of crude (and no doubt very smelly) footwraps, this dude has Doc Martens on. By this point, Citadel's fantasy orcs had started changing overtly into thuggish "bovver boys". It's quite amusing I guess, but not to my taste to be honest. Today, Warhammer orcs have long since become blown-up caricatures of themselves (and they were already caricatures of "traditional" orcs to begin with) and I hate them. Sorry. But seriously, a modern orc's chin alone is bigger than one of Kev Adams's old orcs and has none of the cheeky malice or character.
Moving on though, a note here on eyes, which brings me to the main subject of this post, sort of.
Back when my dad was working feverishly on the Skaven for Advanced Heroquest, he opted for painting them with yellow eyes. An interesting choice, and looked really good actually. Very animal-like. However, it's a proven fact that evil creatures have red eyes, without exception. The exception that proves the rule was my childhood cat, Tabby. He had green eyes, but, and I have to say this, even by cat standards he really was an evil little shit.
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| Tabby the |
So, I departed from my dad's colour scheme there and went for red eyes for my Skaven, as is only true and proper. But again, my dad's Skaven were painted in the same old military enamels, and it's primarily this that inspired my feelings about what Skaven should look like. Mainly dark and grubby.
I mentioned in a previous post not liking how my Skaven looked with ratty flesh-coloured hands and feet, but for plague infected ratscum, I thought it might look nice if their fur had started falling out or something. So experimentally, I tried this on a plague censer bearer. Annoyingly, it looked really good and made me wish I'd done it for the other Skaven too. Especially as I painted a couple of plague related Skaven prior to this one. Oh well.
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| Only two of these rats are true plague worshippers, but the Night Runner on the right has a slight cold, so it's all good. |
I have to say I was pretty pleased with the warpscroll in particular. It required the use of what my partner calls my "spider's foot" paintbrush. I'll leave you for now with the wise words of Trey Azagthoth from Morbid Angel, because it's extremely "Oldhammer". I just made a couple of appropriate corrections to an otherwise perfect lyric.
I call forth the lord of plague
Consume their puny souls
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