RATS!

Been working on this for the last few weeks - it started as a commission to paint Deathmaster Snitch, and it got a little out of hand.... I was looking forward to painting Snitch, it's a pretty old miniature (1987...?) but the sculpt still really holds up I think. Still the best miniature in the GW Skaven range in my opinion.

I was thinking about how I was going to paint the miniature, and what I wanted to do for the base - and I came up with this idea.

We generally put all our miniatures on display plinths of different shapes and sizes, and I thought it would be a fun idea to have the miniature inside the base... Originally I was going to drill out the centre of a wooden plinth, but soon abandoned that as unworkable, and scratch built the whole thing. I took some pictures of the base construction and will be posting a short article here soon.

It was one of those ideas that I could picture every detail of right away - so it didn't really take any planning, I just had to build and paint it. I painted the miniature in a slightly lighter scheme that I might have done with a different base - but I wanted to make sure that he popped out from the sewer tunnel. The paint scheme is really a bit of a homage to the time period when the Skaven first come out - when John Blanche made checks a classic miniatures decoration.

It was s lot of fun to be making a diorama again - even a small one like this. It just makes me want to build something a little more ambitious... Mind you - the time I put into even this little scene reminds me of how long those complex dioramas used to take me!

mike