Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - The Untamed

I'm in a painting mode recently and I managed to finish up some more weird Blood Bowl beastmen, so here we go with the next two, the feral Untamed, continuing the idea of a grimdark team, desribed a bit HERE.

I like those two - the giant's head on legs was one of the earliest ideas I had for this team and the second one was created by basically pairing random bits together - and he came out really well with those tongue-hands of his. They also offered something more than the last ones when it came to painting - a larger surface of checkered metal and wet arms respectively. I can also mention this time the bases and blue grass - I was wondering for a long time how should I base them to fit the theme. This was a last-minute experiment and also turned out not that bad - almost as if it was photoshopped to change the hue of the pitch, which works fine for Chaos.

The WIPs for both of them can be found HERE and HERE.

While some players of the Lost & Damned team can’t bear existing in the corporeal world, others manage fine, but they are wrought with other issues. The Untamed, as they are usually called - their minds stopped controlling their bodies a long time ago. Those wretches are wild, basic, animalistic, unable to understand the game, and following their vague, violent instincts. Still, they are useful in a scrap and actually simple enough for their coach to overwrite their impulses directly if need be. Dangerous meat puppets, they keep running on the pitch without a pleasant nor a painful thought, until they are destroyed and finally released from their fate.  

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - The Unkind

My motivation is out of whack recently, so instead of continuing with the older Kreegan Krashers as I should, I started painting my much weirder flavor of a Chaos Team - The Lost & The Damned.

In general, this will be my dark, "28" take on Blood Bowl. While the Punters already use a darker palette, they are still rather silly. This will not be the case here. I intend to make them as gloomy as I can - and if the models won't be enough, I'll add some despair in the backgrounds too.

Just like with the WIPs, I will be starting with the "beastmen" - I separated them into 6 groups once again (I don't have much more steam to churn them out faster...), with some theme to bind them together every time. We're starting with the "Unkind", creatures that are just badly pieced by the forces of chaos, hurting badly and more than willing to hurt someone back on the pitch. One of them is a literal sack of flesh and organs barely holding together and the other one was blessed with metal pieces growing from under the skin, with all the unpleasantness that it may entail.

The painting was simple enough, nothing extravagant yet. I decided to make their team armor a red-white checkered pattern, which was supposed to be both old-school and work well with the weathering. Then it turned out pretty Croatian... I never realized it before! Well, after all the scratches and dirt were applied, it wasn't as bright and glaring as before. There's not much of it here, it should be more pronounced on later models. I also stopped writing the player's names on the bases - it made them too crowdy - a number will suffice from now on, for any new teams.

The WIPs for both of them can be found HERE and HERE.

When everyone became fixated with Blood Bowl, many quickly adapted to this new reality. Far away from all that, in the Chaos Wastes, the creatures stirred in their confusion and frustration - the whole world was filled with rage and despair just as much as before, but now they could not partake in it. While saner followers of Chaos found great success in Blood Bowl, the malformed beings forming and disappearing in the wastes were just too strange, too different. Only after many years, born from random mutations, a team emerged to partake in the game - The Lost & The Damned they were called. Unwelcome and unwanted, they still have a hard time fitting in. Some of their players, the Unkind, are just so disfigured, mutated, and badly pieced together, the reality of the world weighs on them, causing physical pain - and they just want to take it out on the pitch. Without anything to lose or regret, they are as determined as they are cruel.

Malignant Plaguecaster - WIP

WH40K with Nurgle continues. I wanted to have more finished conversions before I start painting, so I did some other characters too, besides the Lord of Contagion two posts ago. Today comes the Malignant Plaguecaster, the simple psyker from the previous starter set.

I was mostly fine with the model, except for the puff of noxious gas that he was blowing from his hand - I hate painting such special effects. I decided to replace it with a writing mass of tendrils, which is both properly substantial and also a connection to the flesh horror theme of this army. There is a toothy maw between them - it was a perfect use for the little squig that I spared from Mollog's kit.

Blood Bowl Markers - Pleasant Buzzbugs

Once again I'm here with a small project that's actually painted - re-roll markers for my Nurgle team.

While absolutely anything can be used for this purpose, my Putrid Punters are now a very long-term idea when I want to have anything for them that fits the theme, so all the staff, star players, scenery, up to the whole stadium at some point. That's why I wanted those little bugs to serve as markers and they will deplete as I use them up - I don't expect to have more that 4 re-rolls for them anyway.

Eyestinger Swarms from Kill Team: Rogue Trader box were perfect for this role - small, characterful and fitting (despite coming from WH40K). I converted them just a little bit - some details on the bases to replace those overly science-fiction ones. I am actually surprised how well those orange wings turned out with the yellowish-greenish tones I used for their skin, I have to consider using one of the bigger winged models for something! Maybe a cameraman...

Every time a Nurgle team trains, they sweat a lot. And I mean, a lot! The peculiar fragrance this creates attracts certain insects, that the Punters came to call them “pleasant buzzbugs”. They swarm up around the stadium during those preparatory sessions and often stick around for the match itself too. The buzzing noise they create is very pleasant (hence the name!) to the followers of Nurgle, filling them with confidence about themselves and their good god. This means that the more bugs, the better they are prepared to play! Still, should they run out of favor of Grandfather Nurgle during the play, the bugs will lose their interest and fly away - giving the opposing team a signal that maybe the rotting ones are finally running out of steam!

Lord of Contagion - WIP

The unexpected happened - I got myself some first 40k minis to paint, an actual collection!

Blood Bowl got me into Nurgle good and I just couldn't stop marveling over modern Death Guard miniatures - all of them full of little, unneccesary detail, holes and gribbles, with so many variants and options... Death Guard players are just spoiled with how rich the range is - so I decided to give them a go. I am quite fascinated with morbid combinations of flesh and machine and this project will be good for exploring that - once I get their style and theme right.

The big leader guy from the previous starter set, Lord of Contagion, seemed like a very good start. The current idea for their theme is white/wintery armor with an industrial and soviet feel to them - with some flesh&technological horror included. To get some of that that, I cut off the special effects from his back (I hate painting those) and replaced them with some smokestacks. He is standing on a T-35 tank turret I painted in middle school - to make him stand out a little bit more and get that some soviet points too. The original tank model was wrecked by a cat long time ago, so this is its new purpose.

Some more HQ will be coming up while I'll be exploring the color scheme and trying out some snow effects for the bases.

Underworlds - Mollog's Mob - WIP

Seeing the approaching 4th season of Underworlds, I decided to buy the last of the expected-to-be-discontinued 2nd season warbands that I liked - the Mollog's Mob. When they first appeared, I disliked them, they were a bit too comical for me, at least for Underworlds. Then I got into Instagram and followed a bunch of AoS28 folks and the idea on how to convert them slowly appeared in my head.

As far as I saw, one of the easiest way to make a monster creepier is to make it more human, have human attributes when one would expect monstrous ones, make the weird thing that much closer to us. To achieve that, I gave every single creature in the band, a human-like face - the troll, the squigs, the frog, everything. Because of the scale difference, every face turned out pretty distinct and characterful, an unexpected, yet good feature.

With the main man here below, I wanted to go a small step beyond - which was inspired by the great menagerie of grimdark Giants which can be seen HERE and the manga/anime Shingeki no Kyojin - where the giants are not just big humans, but humanlike creatures that were scaled up to their size, unperfectly, like in an broken mirror, or by an unskilled creator. Those creatures carry certain human features, but they are all set up wrong - so my 'Mollog' has a very wide mouth and instead of a club, his whole left hand has way too many joints and is just generally too long. The original troll's uneven proportions were perfect for this. Someone may say that this is too small for a giant, but I like my giants on a spectrum - which starts from about this size, when it can overpower an average human with size alone and devour later, if not whole, then bite by bite.

And here are the squigs, little minions of 'Mollog' - those were nice and easy conversions.

Sir Vannier, the Knight of the Realm

Because of some delays, I am filling this week with another Bretonnian oldie dug up from the cupboard - a mounted hero model, painted in 2008.

He is one of the first, if not THE first, Bretonnian model I ever painted. I still haven't decided how I want this force to look like, so he has some weird elements to him, like 'cool' non-heraldric dragons on the barding or gold, metallic trim between two colors there. I had just bought my first greenstuff back then, so I was eager to use it - so he has those two useless ribbons on his back. Fun times.

He was supposed to be a character in my army, but then I designed to convert my own character out of a common knight, so this nice, metallic model was relegated to being just a champion of the same unit of the Knights of the Realm. Maybe I'll finish them someday - continuing a 12-13-year-old plan for a game that long since stopped existing - nothing I haven't done already, so it's not out yet.

To ensure a smooth organization of Bretonnian lances on the field of battle, a lord needs his officers, his Gallants - who are most often chosen for their loyalty or skill in combat. Sir Vannier is not of those - he would be discharged many years ago, but because of an ancient treaty between his family and his sire's, Vannier, as well as his ancestors and descendants, has an ensured high position in Earl Sagremor's army. He may be carrying a lance tipped with a dragon's tooth and look very regal, but it's just equipment he got from his braver fathers - current Vannier is a cruel, petty, and bigoted man. Using his position and privilege, he often raids his own villages to pillage and harass the peasants, sics bandits on foreign traders, and tortures his captives, human or otherwise. While some share his ideas, many find that brutish man distasteful at best - but Bretonnia's rigid code of honor and laws don't leave much room for opinions and preferences.