Hi Bryan - I paid you for that first "test unit" via paypal yesterday. Please confirm it came through o.k.
I, too, am looking forward to seeing a huge army of "museum quality" rampaging around my table! Its really going to hurt my wallet but as its spread out over a year, and as my self employed business is doing really well at the moment, it can take it.
Basing wise, I normally pva and sand, then paint a dark brown base colour, then I drybrush it with a bleached bone colour, then I add static grass/tufts. If you are happy to do a swamp theme style base along with the agreed price then that'd look good! (perhaps you could do a small example on a piece of cardboard or something first?).
There'll be some clippin and snippin! I like the units to be based as big hordes. (the full 12 figures per base, regardless of what type of troops they are). They should have a slightly irregular formation - think huddles of warriors/rat pack rather than nice neat lines of soldiers. I have clipped off the weapon teams and globadiers to make separate stands of these and will be sending these off to be painted as alternative units at the end of the project. (they'll be used as alternative clanrat units with magic banner rules etc). I like as much variety as possible on each stand (as few duplicate figures as possible) and a typical clanrat unit of 3 stands might have 1 stand without any banners, 1 stand with the flag/pennant figure and the final stand with the little iron rune standard. In this way when they're all done, what I'll do is arrange them in 3 distinct types of units - the standardless units (skavenslaves) and the other two types with standards.
I forgot to send you the warmaster plastic bases for the test unit, I'll send an extra set of 3 bases with the first big batch. I'm starting all my cleaning up of the bare metal today!
Dave
