Update: February 01, 2017

Operation try and paint at least one hour a week has been in full gear and I'm slowly (oh, so very slowly) getting my Ratkin done for my Kings of War army. I haven't dedicated much more than an hour a week yet (I might have gotten two hours in last week), but progress is progress and deserves to be acknowledged.

This is the same Ratkin army that I was trying to get together for last year's West Coast GT. I finished several of the bases for the units and some of the smaller units, but the larger ones evaded me. This year, I plan on at least finishing a few of the units despite everything else going on in my life.

This unit is the Blight Horde. I finished the base for the unit and the one test model in time for the tournament so that I could at least show what the unit was. Now, I want to get down and bust out the remaining 20 rats that need to go on the base. As you can see, the models are in various stages of base painting. I have been breaking down the unit in little groups trying so that I can make sure I am making similar progress across the whole unit rather than painting a single model at a time. This is what I have managed to knock out so far:

These guys are just the very first level of base paint. The rat fur an skin is a couple of different shades of brown or grey and all the cloth the same color across all the models to both tie the whole unit together, but also to make some of the individual rats stand out so that it looks more like an actual army than a group of clones. I am not that careful at this stage and you can see some primer showing through because I will be going over these with a wash.

These guys have just been washed with a dark brown (Devlan Mud) and are still drying. Compared with some of my other armies I don't care about bubbles, or too much ink, because I will be layering the cloth and rats are also just dirty creatures.

I've also done a few other washes on the cloth with a lighter brown, a green (to show off some disease), and a couple in purple (just to try something different).

For the last few models, I have just started to go back over the cloth to start the layering process. I started with the green-washed models to see what kind of effect it would have. It doesn't have the same dirty look that the brown wash does, but I think with proper layering and then some goo fur work it will pop out as a more diseased look than normal.

Next up is bringing all the models to this first layer of color and then slowly building up the cloth work trying to do one color across all the models at a time (which will probably mean a few hours at a time when I can find it). After that, I will start to work on the fur and faces. Hopefully, by the end of this month all of the models will be at least on that stage.