Blood Bowl Chaos Beastmen - WIP 4

Guess what, even more weird Beastmen for my Chaos Team.  

On the left you have, in my opinion, the weirdest member of the team, the flatface. Inspired by the Pantheon of Chaos banners the most - which, in turn, take a lot from Ian Miller's art for the Lost&Damned book - and the Demibuer from the Gardens of Hecate. I was intrigued by the idea, that with Chaos you can have such a logic-defying creature running about. Multi-jointed legs that probably creak with movement just add to the whole effect. Thus, he has the 'Disturbing Presence' skill.  

The second one is the sackboy, as I currently call him - literally a sack of flesh and bones, stitched together on stick-figure legs and let loose on the pitch. Like this, it's only natural that he has the Frenzy skill - in his state, the is not much place for sanity. This one will be probably the only kinda-gory one in the whole bunch - I guess I can't escape my undead roots. The head was inspired by Jon Davies' pestigors - and that idea was mixed with the Tubby Demon by Emortal982. Weirdly enough, I was unaware of the second inspiration - I thought I devised it on my own, but after sculpting it and looking in my inspirations folder, I noticed an uncanny resemblance between them... oh well, subconsciousness!

Tutorial - Quick & Easy Lava Bases

Many months ago I previewed a project of a Chaos Renegades team for Blood Bowl - and while working on them is getting delayed and delayed, I had at least time to experiment with their basing. To go with their full-on-chaos theme, I decided to give them lava bases - with some lines on the bases to simulate pitch markings. After several failures, I got the process right and I want to share it with you. It's actually very easy if you keep some things in mind.

I start by painting the bases white. It's mostly to make the next step easier...

...which is painting them yellow. This color doesn't cover very well, so it works the best at the bottom layer.

Now it's time for the lava colors themselves. I gathered some warm yellows, oranges, browns and reds, with some white and black for the extremes. The precise colors are not that important, but the general tone and range.

Then, using a fair amount of water, I began wetblending the lava image. It may sound daunting, but we are not going for smoothness or precision here - I start by doing a yellow center and a red outside, after which I mix some oranges in the middle, while dabbing a bit of brown and black on the outside, with some white in the middle. Here it how it looks during the painting.

Here are my first layers. I didn't know which direction of the gradient I wanted, so decided to try them both out.

The colors were uneven after the first layer, so I did a went gradient again over them - if you are not satisfied with the work so far, you can just wait for this step to dry and try once again. Once there's some paints underneath, every next layer is easier and easier. If wentblending doesn't work, stippling various colors around the base would work too - even a bad gradient will work fine from the thin cracks of the finished piece.

Here are the bases after two coats:

Then, the sporty lines. Just like with the bases themselves, I start with white.

Followed by yellow, going somewhat outside the white line.

Now it's time to blend the lines a bit more - it's flowing lava after all. This part needs even less neatness. If the yellow line is on the yellow background, nothing needs to be done. If the yellow line is on the orange, then I add a bright orange between them. If it's on the red, then I add bright orange followed by dark orange. If it's on the brown, then orange and red - and so far. When that's done, I painted a thin, dotted line of white along the very middle of the line to make it look just a bit hotter.

NOW, A VERY IMPORTANT PART:

Matt Varnish the lava image before proceeding! Crackle paints tend to pull on the paint when contracting, tearing the layers as it goes - I had to redo the whole process several times because of that...

After the Varnish is nice and done, it's time for crackle paint - I used Mordant Earth from GW, a completely black one.

And I applied it with a very thick layer (if you are unsure how thick, just know that it's better to do it too thick and too thin), going up to the middle of the line. When it contracts, it will move away from it, showing it completely, so no worries there.

And after it's dry.

Then do the same thing for the other half - nd the whole thing is ready! The one on the left, hot in the center and cooling near the edges - and one on the right, inversed.

And this is how it looks with a mini on it (a random High Elf 'volunteered' to stand on the lava).

I decided to go with the right one on my minis - not only the cooler part in the middle gives an impression of a shadow underneath a model, the bright yellow edges look more striking against the base's rim.

Blood Bowl Chaos Beastmen - WIP 3

The third batch of the weird beastmen, bringing us to a total of 6, half of the planned 12.  

A long time ago I bought a set of random bits, with a Mournfang head included - I knew I had to use it on this project. Still, the head was quite large and didn't fit all the beastman bodies that I had. After some experimentation, a ghoul body worked perfectly, creating this head-torsoed creature slouched under its own weight. I was unsure what to do with the arms until I finally decided to make them grow from the mouth itself - it's meant as a bifurcated tongue that happened to grow actual arm muscles and fingers on the ends, to be used as extra legs for running and handling the ball.    

The one on the right is the thrower - I really wanted to have at least one beastmen capable of passing the ball. It took me ages to decide on an interesting mutation to represent that - I considered a mouth that would morph into a grotesque launcher, spring-like limbs, or a fleshy catapult growing on top of the unfortunate player. Finally, I thought of incorporating some mechanical elements - a wheel! It is mounted inside the beastman's body and is integrated with its limbs - with the spin creating extra momentum, this thrower can pass farther any mundane being! The feet from this body were used on the birdlike beastman so this one got some vaguely Salvador Dali-like legs.

Blood Bowl Chaos Beastmen - WIP 2

People seemed to like my Hieronymus Bosch-esque beastmen for Blood Bowl, so here I am with some more of them.

The one on the left, The Snail is one of my favorites in the whole bunch - and was mostly inspired by one weird apostle found in the Berserk manga (which was a great inspiration for this project in general!). This concept was just the right mix of silly, weird and disturbing. That got then mixed with the idea of two similar heads made from Daemonette musician horns to create the dysfunctional player you can see below. Legs and arms were supposed to go from the same hole as the heads, but that looked too busy - so I went with numerous, asymmetrical holes for the limbs. It is a mystery how it manages to even move forward and I like that. 

The other one was supposed to get the 'Extra Arms' skill, so together with a Tzaangor head that I wanted to use I got myself a vaguely Skeksis-inspired (from Dark Crystal) beastman. I didn't want his head to be horned, so he has them on his shoulders, just to mix things a little. With this skill, he will be probably the most competent player from all the beastmen - I'm not planning them to be especially competitive. 

Stay tuned, I'm not even halfway done with them.