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Author Topic: Blood Bowl Humans; first game (and loss), against the Norse  (Read 1180 times)

Offline Daeothar

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Blood Bowl Humans; first game (and loss), against the Norse
« on: November 13, 2018, 11:24:39 AM »
Lately, I've been on a Dropfleet Commander spree, painting ship after ship, but two weeks ago, I decided I needed a change of pace.

Something completely different (as John Cleese would say), and I rummaged around in my lead- and plastic pile, looking for a suitable little side project. Which I subsequently found, in the form of a plastic Human team for Blood Bowl.

Not the current multipart plastics, but the good old monopose plastics, that came with an opposing ork team in the 3rd ed (?) boxed set.

This was suitably different from anything I had painted lately, so I set to work prepping them. And I couldn't help myself making them look a bit more varied. So I did some very simple limb swaps on the catchers and throwers, creating 4 unique poses.

Then I decided I wanted no duplicates at all in the team, so I set to work on the remaining ten team members. First, I dug around in my bits box(es), and found a suitable sallet helmet for one of the blitzers, making him even more armoured. I cut off the huge icon on the top of the helmet, and added a sliver of a torso socket from somewhere, to give the helmet a dome shape again.

I took particular care to cut off the original head in such a way that it could be re-used too.

Some arm repositioning, and it was on to the six linemen.

These obviously posed the largest challenge, as I had to make something unique out of each of them. Of course I kept one in the original pose, so that left five.

One, I gave an arm from a Chaos Marauder, in a slightly different pose. I decided this would become the team captain, so I added a helmet plume to him as well.

The third, I cut off the left arm, shaped the remainder on the torso with my X-acto and jeweler's files, and added another gloved hand/arm hanging straight down. I believe it came from a Chaos Warrior.

Number four I simply reposed the arm, and replaced his head with the one from the up-armoured blitzer, positioned at an angle, so he looked to his left.

Five got his entire right arm, including (huge) shoulderpad cut off and repositioned to point forward. And to make things quick and easy, I replaced his fist with a metal, pointing Space Marine hand. This was the only metal and pinned bit on the entire team.

And for the last one, I remembered my first BB team; Goblins. they had plenty of secret weapons, and to make these guys not look like complete goodytwoshoes, I gave him a hidden dagger, you know; just to level the playing field a bit. It was a 2nd ed plastic Space Marine dagger, which I cut down a bit, to make it look less like a sword/hatchet, and more like something that could actually be snuck onto the field.

And that was it! This took me just a couple of hours, and after basing, they were ready for painting.


I tried something new here too. Must have been all those painting tutorials, but I decided to first undercoat them a dark grey, and then do a zenithal spray of white, to help in the shading. Pre-shading, I believe it's called.

A nice idea, and I'm sure it could work really well, when used with black instead of grey, but as it was, I eventually ended up overpainting the entire effect. More practice required I suppose, but I'll try it again.

I wanted as bright a result as possible, to contrast the dirty and darker colours of my gobbos, so I went with sky blue and white. And when it came to decide on a contrast/detail colour, I went with a complementary orange instead of my original idea of red, and I think it worked out very well.

Painting was fast and furious, as I wanted this to be a quick side project, and not a full fledged thing taking weeks. In the end, I decided to do some cleaning up after all, but overall, I only spent about three to four evenings on them, which is really fast for me.

And since I could not find the decal sheet that came with the box, I spent another half hour or so designing and printing the winged numbers to fit on their shoulder pads, in an approximation of the light blue colour I had used on the uniforms. Of course they came out too dark, so after applying and sealing them, I went over the numbers with sky blue, to blend them in with the rest of the miniatures a bit more.

Obviously, I then promptly relocated my original decal sheets, as you do when you don't need them anymore... ::)

Finally, I flocked the bases with more static grass than usual; this was suposed to be a BB pitch after all. And because the blades were too tall to work as such, I ended up cutting them down using a small, pointy pair of scissors, and had a good laugh at myself when doing this, as I was suddenly reminded of Asterix and the Britons, where the Britons used a similar method to cut their lawns... lol

I then painted some white stripes on the grass (and dirt), cleaned up the base edges, and called them done.

It then took another couple of weeks (and Crisis!) to then gloss and matt seal them, as they would probably see some furious action, but that was it; side project complete! :)

As I found out, I also have an old metal Hoshi Komi miniature, and got my hands on a Mighty Zug mini as well, with a Griff Oberwald inbound as I type this, to round out a complement of star players for them. (I'm still contemplating getting a Zara the Slayer as well, but she goes for crazy money!) So those will be painted eventually too. I even printed some winged star decals for them as well.

If everything goes well, they will play their inaugural match this evening, and get soundly trashed probably, but hey; at least they're done and ready for action! :D
« Last Edit: November 15, 2018, 09:13:11 AM by Daeothar »
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Online The Voivod

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Re: Bloodbowl; Humans
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2018, 10:24:10 PM »
Bloody lovely job you did on them. Beautifull blue.

They where a joy to see in them in the flesh and it was a joy to soundly trash them.
'Mercy? I am far to brave to grant you mercy.'

Offline Daeothar

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Re: Bloodbowl; Humans
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2018, 08:19:14 AM »
Yep; they got solidly trounced as expected.

Bloodbowl was never a strongpoint of mine (if I recall correctly, I've never even won a single game ::) ).

So pitting a bunch of baby blue generic humans against a Norse team with a Yeti and Werewolf was probably not the best of ideas to begin with, and not even cheating helped me against a savvy player and a hard hitting team.

Yes; I accidentally placed all 12 of my players on the pitch, and we only found out around the time this picture was taken; one of my players attempted a foul, which of course totally backfired (I rolled doubles of course, and then also failed to penetrate his armour). So After than moment, at least there were the right amount of players on the field lol

Then; it's all in the spirit of the game, even though this one was purely by accident...

Too bad time restraint forced me to leave after the Norse scored their first goal in round 5 or 6 of the first half, but for a moment there, it could have gone either way.

Anyway; the boys in blue will be back with reinforcements, as soon as Zug, Griff and Hoshi are done... :D