The launch box for the new edition of Warhammer Age of Sigmar goes up for pre-order very soon. It contains over 70 amazing new miniatures, more than half of which are the grubby Skaven fiends absolutely bursting with detail. They were brought to life by the ’Eavy Metal team, so we painted out a runic circle with Warpstone Glow and rang 13 bells to summon Content Lead Max to explain how they got all that grime just so.
Defining the Skaven in the Age of Sigmar
Max: Working on the new Skaven range for Skaventide was similar to the recent Flesh-eater Courts update. The Skaven are originally from the World-that-Was, and a lot of their visual identity is still based on Warhammer Fantasy Battles. This was the first time – outside of a few miniatures over the past few years – we have had to fully contextualise them within the Age of Sigmar.
One of the first questions we asked was about how the Skaven would engage with the Mortal Realms. Two things really sum up their disposition. Firstly, they are covetous: they know enough to want what other people have, and to feel that their lot is unfair.
Secondly, their lifespan is incredibly short – maybe 10 or 15 years for a Clanrat if they’re extremely lucky. They’re reckless backstabbers, and they dabble with warpstone because they have little time to think about the consequences. Everything they want, they need to have right now because they might not be here in a few weeks’ time.
This gives us a great perspective on how turbulent their lives are, grounding them in a way we can start to interpret through colour schemes. It also gives them one of their big hooks – that tumultuous, disorganised nature. The Skaven are a truly chaotic faction of conflicting individuals. There are no grand unified legions, and the Clawlords are striking a sprawling web of deals, working in betrayals and compromises to amass a vast army.
We developed this idea of a ramshackle, brokered force while working hard to keep the identity of the Great Clans, which each have a very strong visual identity. The launch box represents this narrative: the Clawlord thinks he’s in charge, and so does the Grey Seer – who is going to backstab whom first?
Adding Colour to the Skaven Great Clans
We had to make sure the Great Clans had a strong baseline visual identity – created by a specific colour palette and certain icons, creating a comprehensive style guide for each, alongside certain agnostic runes and unifying elements across the box such as weathered metals, warpstone, rotting wood, and so on.
Skryre has a large presence in the Skaventide box, with a substantial hierarchy. There’s the Warlock Engineer, then the gunner of the Ratling Warpblasters, the Jezzail gunners, and finally the lowly crew pushing the Warpblaster. There are lots of pale and warm teals – the primary Skryre colour – for the weapons operators, – while the Warlock elites are in rich purples and burgundies.
We worked out a “bits box” of icons that we could pull on for each clan. Skryre has lightning bolt motifs, whereas Pestilens always have this three-pointed spike icon. These are runes that the Skaven themselves have to draw. There are no sharply drawn lines or perfect keylines around white circles, but instead overlapping colours and dripping elements with a sketchy feeling.
Painting the Horde of Clanrats
The 40 Clanrats were a massive job spread out across eight people. No one painted more than four or five, which naturally came with its own challenges: we wanted there to be no duplicates even though we were working with two frames of 20 rats, so we had to coordinate.
We also wanted to hint towards the different great Clans that they would perhaps have aspirations to join, hinting at the wider world of Skaven. On top of this, we included the red colours of the Clans Verminus. This is always part of the challenge for ’Eavy Metal: how do we make miniatures compositionally interesting in a way that makes them stand out, and in a way that realistically sells the narrative?
In the past, we’ve quite harshly delineated the skin and fur textures on Skaven, but as a team, we have come to prefer a more naturalistic approach that follows rodents in real life. We found that it was very common for the fur on rodents to thin along the limbs until just pink skin was left showing.
Warpstone and the Gnaw
The skin, fur, wooden details, certain neutral metals, and the environment they all live in, which is represented by grime, weathering, and oxidation, are the same across the Clans.
Warpstone is another unifying element. We didn’t want one singular warpstone recipe, but there are principles: it is green as long as it is menacing and ominous, and changes hue based on potency and concentration – warpstone ores are quite subtly coloured, while pure refined chips of warpstone are a violent, acid green – there was no room for warm and comfortable teals.
With the Vermindoom as an inciting event, the Skaven have also teleported their own cursed environment into Mortal Realms, bringing with them ruins, debris, and pools of roiling warp-stuff. This was another great chance to bring in some unifying elements, whether it was oxidised metallics or the green from the bubbling pits of warpstone-polluted liquids.
Elevating the Leaders
Whenever the Warhammer Studio works on a miniature like this we know that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and try to create the best version we can. In the future, someone might come along and try to outdo that, but we want to make their job as hard as possible!
The new version is such a fantastic miniature, and as part of painting it, I looked at every single Grey Seer we have ever done and cherry-picked all the elements I thought were the best, referencing Phil Moss's extremely pale rendition on the battletome from the previous edition. This contrasts against the much darker and dingier miniatures in Skaventide, while trying to capture the traditional bluey grey we’ve also used on previous Grey Seers.
I differentiated areas of the cloth by painting them with different values, taking special attention to ensure that the top of the Grey Seer’s robe pops. The elements towards the bottom are more weathered and covered with grime to keep the whole miniature feeling grounded and grimy.
We freehanded the banners on the Clanrats in the same scratchy manner that we used for the runes and also added some freehand to the Clawlord on Gnaw-beast. There are a lot of triangular patterns here, and the idea is that while the Skaven wouldn’t have the patience to paint intricate designs, their fidgety and obsessive nature would manifest in compulsively scrawling out the same pattern.
The halberd is also an interesting example of using countershading to make elements stand out. The very vivid green contrasts with the deep purple tones and makes it look unique among the other warpstone elements, without losing that key feeling of unification. It reinforces the idea that the Clawlord has special equipment – essentially, there’s warpstone, and then there’s warpstone, and this guy has the nastiest, purest stuff as part of his weapon. By pushing it that little bit further, it helps him stand out as unique, but it is also built on those foundations we laid out across the box.
Thanks, Max. You’ll be able to take these tips and apply them to your own copy of Skaventide, which is available for pre-order from the 29th of June. We have lots more Skaventide painting content to come in the near future, so keep an eye out on Warhammer Community for more inspiration.