Recently got battalion. When it came to making the skinks, I had a problem. There are no bare arms for shields on the sprue, on a sprue for six skinks there are 5 right-handed javelins and 2 left-handed ones. I didnt want blowpipes but I also noticed there are only 5 blowpipes per sprue rather than six. Help!
If you have the Battalion there should be an instructional booklet on how to assemble the models. Basically for a shield arm you'll need to snip the hand weapon off. It's pretty simple. Also yes, I don't think they give you enough weapon arms to make all of the Skinks have the same weapon type. Kind of a bummer.
The skinks have jav+shield+hand weapons, so it makes sense to glue the shields on the HW-arms. I think there are only 8 blowpipes in there, so you'll have to get creative if you want to make blowpipes, I snipped some javs into blowpipes, looks pretty decent when painted.
I just made some of them left-handed and painted them in a different colour. Gave them the blowpipe right arm, removed the blowpipe, and glued on a shield. Worked pretty well, even if the arm looks a tad... wrong, somehow. I did get myself 2 battalion boxes, so I have a few more of them. It's kind of sad that they are forcing you to either get creative with your modelling, or just field half javs, half blowpipes. But since the battalion is intended as a starting point, I do see the merit, as it allows you to try out both options. In theory, at least. Since you have to field 10 models in a unit, you effectively only get 10 skinks, not 12. The last two could be modelled as blowpipe guys, but cannot actullly be used by themselves. It seems a bit weird.
As stated above you just have to be creative. Make some left handed ones and glue the shields to the opposite arm, the one with the hand weapon. Convert as needed..