Skaven Haemonculus w/ Webway Portal

Or should it be "ratway portal"?


One of the central visual images that guided this "Kabal of the Fursaken" project, was that of a horde of rats pouring up and out of a hole in the ground.  Naturally, I made my webway portal marker a crater/hole, with a few small rats crawling towards the edges.  What was a bit less obvious, was how to suggest just where and how this hole would appear.  Enter the Haemonculus...

I used a pewter Skaven engineer as the base for this model.  I removed the small pistol the engineer was originally holding, and replaced it with the drill from a killa kan.  The drill has a ball on the end of it, to be used when mounting into the socket of the killa kan arm.  I noticed that the small rat on the Haemonculus' backpack, was seated on a bomb of similar size and shape.  This pretty much figured itself out.

I added a fuse (made of wire) to the ball on the end of the drill, and gave the rat on the Haemonculus' backpack a lit match (made of a bit of putty and paper-clip wire), with the flame lingering dangerously close to the fuse.  When painting the model, I made sure to show the two bombs are made of the same material.  While the Haemonculus himself came out a bit less "creepy-albino rat" than I had originally planned, I think that the wysiwyg webway carries much of the attention anyway.

So the final image I was going for:  Skaven engineer runs towards the enemy line.  He lifts an enormous drill-explosive contraption, while one of his minion rats strikes a match, and lights the fuse.  The engineer tosses the drill like a lawn-dart, and it quickly vanishes into the ground, leaving a trail of sparks from the smouldering fuse.  After a moment, the warpstone bomb detonates underground, and the hole left behind is quickly filled by the hordes of Skaven that have been approaching the battle underground.

Good times.