Blood Bowl Nurgle Team - Bloaters WIP

I converted the Rotters and then some Pestigors for my Nurgle Blood Bowl team, now it's finally time for the Warriors, or how they are now called - the Bloaters. Those big, slow and bulky roadblocks are the core of the team and my favorite positionals in the team, the stars that crush the opposition with their mutated fists.

Ones available in the current GW kit are fine models, but in no way how I envision those players. After playing Blood Bowl 2 video game, I imagine them more similar to stereotypical Chaos Warrior, with armor and spikes. The most obvious choice in this situation was to revisit the delightful kit of Putrid Blightkings. I choose 4 of them, leaving one to serve as a Head Coach later and went crazy with the conversions representing their skills, just like my other players from this team.

Wanting to justify their heavy armor, atypical for modern Bloaters, I came up with a backstory that they were displaced through time by Nurgle, many, many years forward, making them living (?) relicts of the old ways. To go extra ancient I gave them roman-themed names and crests on the heads. This brings them all together as the special players and strengthens the effect of how ancient and out-of-touch with the modern Blood Bowl fashion they are.

Here are they all together:

And some closer photos.

Captain on the left was the first that I made and which gave me the least problems when deciding what to do. This is easily my favorite pose out of the Blightkings kit and came together beautifully with what I had in mind - the stone under the foot got changed into a ball, left hand was in great position to sculpt a scary pincer there (instead of some variation on Wolverine claws, I went with the classic interpretation of the 'Claw' mutation) and the outstretched hand was perfect for a 'thumbs down' gesture, bringing even more Roman themes into the whole mess.

The second one has 'Stand Firm' as his upgrade and this one took the longest to design. At first, I wanted to give him thick and bloated legs, but then it would be too similar to the captain's right leg - so I left this topic for a while. Only later I decided to turn his legs into a mass of swarming tentacles and worms - which both greatly illustrates how well is he glued to the ground but also fits Grandfather Nurgle perfectly.

Here below, the guy on the left is the one that rolled doubles when leveling - and he got 'Jump Up' which helps players get up quickly after being knocked down. To represent that, I decided to give him a lot of spider legs sticking from his back - which would prop him back easily after he falls down. His body was the most armored of all the Blightkings, so to retain some balance I decided to make him completely unarmored from the breastplate up - like rotting meat rupturing a metal can.

And the last one is the Bloater with 'Mighty Blow'. I thought about representing it quite a lot and many options were just not good - giving him a large fist could be confused with 'Big Hand' while adding a lot of spikes on it could be confused with 'Claw'. I considered giving him a heavy hand made out of stone, but in the end, I decided on giving him a thick, flexible appendage ending with a spiked ball - like a fleshy flail of sorts - with a sporty armband to keep him properly themed. Hopefully, it's heavy- and slow-looking enough not to be confused with a 'Tentacles' mutation.

There were many different topics here, so once again I did some photos of the actual building progress, to show some of the 'behind the scenes' stuff. They turned out rather long though, so to avoid extending this post to infinity and to get some a post buffer (which I could use for personal reasons right now), I will post them as separate posts in the upcoming weeks, I hope they'll be interesting enough.

I will update this post accordingly to have all those little sculpting tips together with the miniatures they are related to.

First one is about sculpting the Roman-style headcrests that all of them sport:

The second one is about sculpting sick, disproportionate, bloated arms that I did for the 'Stand Firm' guy. Followers of Nurgle allow for some leeway when it comes to anatomy, so it's both quite easy to do and a good place to practice greenstuffing.

The third and the last one is about the wriggling, tentacle legs of the 'Stand-Firm' guy. It explains the principles of doing a similar composition of tentacles, how to sculpt different kinds of slimy appendages, together with instruction on how to quickly make suction cups for those tentacles.