Blood Bowl Markers - 'Infected Pallid Ale' Kegs

Continuing the streak for my beloved Blood Bowl Team: the Putrid Punters! Thematically related to the previous entry, the Horticulturist, here I am with some tasty, healthy and organic beer.

There is a generic upgrade for every team, the "Bloodweiser Kegs/Babes" which are supposed to reinvigorate the players after they are knocked out - and having some neat marker for those is easy enough. Still, for my Punters, I wanted something special, something that would fit well their alternative take on biology. I had this giant bell laying around and it was a perfect use for it. The second one took some more thinking, but I think it's not worse - a walking gland full of beer, which could be distributed through a fleshy tube - a more organic approach. Both were based on 40K poxwalkers - those small guys are perfect for generic Nurgle dudes. WIP post can be found HERE.

The painting was even better than converting in my opinion. First, there was this giant bell and metal is always welcome. Secondly, the sacs showing between the fleshy bits on the right one were supposed to look half-transparent, showing some contents inside - I never painted something like this, which is also nice. Thirdly, after all was painted I had to do all the water effects, with a large amount of resin in the bell and even more beady foam - also lots of fun. I'm quite satisfied with those.

Another note - I painted many nurgly and undead pieces in my hobby career, with its fair amount of gore and unsavory details, but in my opinion, the "walking keg" is my most disgusting miniature by far.

Edit: Forgot to mention, but this another entry for the small challenge "If not minis, then what?", so about what would you be doing if not hobbying. If I had this crazy amount of time, I would definitely try brewing my own beer. Perhaps more palatable to humans that this thing here.

While most Blood Bowl players and fans love to drink copious amounts of Bloodweiser, the Putrid Punters are beer snobs who bring their own hand-crafted kegs to every party, dismissing famous brand as watered-down parody of real beer. Created in their microbrewery by good Mr.Rotlaug, the Infected Pallid Alle (I.P.A.) is their beverage of choice - with just the right amount of foul bitterness mixed with tangy aftertaste of decay. They bring it to matches either in giant bells or drink it straight from the tap. Only with this behind the sidelines they can be expected to get up from knockouts more often.

Blood Bowl Nurgle Staff - Mr. Rotlaug the Horticulturist

It seems there will be quite a streak of Blood Bowl staff right now - and it's all for the smelly Putrid Punters of Nurgle!

After the Head Coach it's time for the Horticulturist. He's basically a wizard addition for the team, but the whole idea od a nurgly gardener with his free-range bio-vegetables was sweet and I had lots of fun putting this little "almost-a-diorama" together. The WIP post can be found HERE.

Festus was used as a base, because he's basically that as he already is. Still, that wasn't enough, so I have him a snazzy hat, a shovel, lots of healthy produce and a referee to taste his refreshments. He's supposed to be also a beer brewer for my team, so I wanted to put some foam on the guy tasting the brew - a new challenge for me. I made it with small glass beads mixed with gloss varnish and some pale green paint. Does it look okay?

Mr. Rotlaug here is also my answer to yet another challenge amongst polish bloggers, this time it's "If not minis, then what?", as a question what would one be doing if not wasting time and money on this hobby. I live in a modern (poorly lit) apartment, so no farming for me, but I do enjoy my houseplants and would probably work on them a little bit more if not painting minis. Close enough for the topic IMHO!

Every self-respecting Blood Bowl player knows that proper diet and good nutrition are the keys to success on the pitch - and Nurgle players are no different. Pedantic about the quality of their veggies, they often keep a small garden with only the best organic, bio, fair-trade and free-range greens for their high nutritional needs. Those who want to be even more serious about it employ a professional, a horticulturist - and the good Mr. Rotlaug is the one working currently with the Punters. While quite peculiar and difficult to understand (thick dialect developed in Averland), he’s nonetheless extremely knowledgeable and his veggies are truly exemplary. They are so good, actually, that they can be deployed on the pitch as a weapon - being so healthy, they are actually disgusting and distracting to other players that grew up on Big Moot Sandwiches and Orca-Cola - even causing stomach difficulties! Thus, the Punters rely on Mr. Rotlaug every time when they want to make a point of their exceptionally healthy diet and crush their weaker, poorly-fed opponents.

Blood Bowl Nurgle Staff - Marggh Mawgino the Head Coach

After a really long break, here I am again with some content for my beloved Blood Bowl team, the Putrid Punters!

This time it's the head coach, a character that gives you such a rarely used advantage, he's practically useless... but he's still an important person and a great modelling opportunity. As I mentioned in the WIP post, an ogre's body was the core idea for this conversion, all to make him this absolute unit of a coach. It works, he's towering over all his players!

I had to remind myself how to paint this yellow skin, but painting him was an overall pleasant experience. I have some other small things for this band planned, so this was a good warmup.

Through all the years and many time jumps, the Putrid Punters relied on their ancient and trusted coach Oughustus. Unfortunately, the stationary life of a coach made him susceptible to growing greater and more glorious with every season, until he became simply too big to fit in the time portal. Instead, he was consumed by the warp, never to be seen again. Some journalists argue that he ascended to daemonhood, watching the Punters from the comfort of Grandfather Nurgle’s garden. Hard pressed, the team pitched in and recruited a relatively new, fresh and fit head coach Marggh Mawgino. While he’s not as experienced as his predecessor, he knows much more theory and the modern take on Blood Bowl - so maybe together with his ancient, veteran players, they’ll be able to compensate for each other’s weaknesses and achieve something passable.

Blood Bowl Chaos Pact - Specialist Marauders

I am slowly trying to get through all the stuff that I started before the big hiatus and one of those is the Chaos Pact team for Blood Bowl that I got as a present back in 2019. I already painted the renegade part of the team, as well as half of the humans, now it's time to do the second half. First five marauders were thought of as blitzers and fighters, those here are more specialized and actually capable of handling the ball.

Like before, I wanted to experiment with skintones here, so they are quite a diverse bunch. It was an interesting experience, I'll have to broaden my horizons a bit more in other projects too. Besides, I must admit, I'm quite glad with how their hair came out. I hate painting long hair usually, but this time it went well - perhaps it's because of the sculpt itself.

While his new marauder blitzers were already sparring with the renegades, the goblin headhunter Dugtig was slowly paging through other applications from other Kreegans, a violent fan-group. He wasn’t getting very far until he questioned Ragnar the Red. That outspoken Kreegan not only convinced the goblin that he was a good choice for a player, he was also able to give some good pointers on finding some specialists amongst the rowdy rabble. Together they gathered the marauders that would be tasked with handling the ball on the pitch - with Ragnar being chosen as the obvious captain of the team. Now, with such a strong core of the rowdy hooligans, Dugtig decided to name the team “The Kreegan Krashers”.

This time the boys are first. The middle one is Ragnar the Red, the captain of the team - and I think I made his red mane stand out quite nicely. The one on the left was slightly converted to sport some extra arms.

And the girls. The one on the left was converted a bit to hold a ball up, I designed her to serve as a thrower for the team. The other one, I'm surprised how post-apocalyptic she turned out! It wasn't (consciously) intended, but with that dark clothing and green mohawk, she would fit in Fallout right in!

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - Hieronymus the Unabated

I'm back to at least post something for my very own topic for the game mentioned in the previous post. I feel quite guilty about inactivity here, but there was home improvement, sickness and lots of work to be done lately... Hopefully I can regain some speed after going on a vacation for a moment.

I chose the "Heavy Metal" topic because I had this guy almost ready and he's probably the most fitting for this out of everything I have at hand! A product of the sleep-deprived mind of a very new father, he's finally ready. Hieronymus, the namesake of the painter that inspired the general mood of this team. This nice tin fishman turned a little different from the early sketches, but I still like him like this. With all this metal, painting process was quick and enjoable.

All the general design ideas about them are in the WIP post to be found HERE.

Hieronymus the Unabated is a well-known member of the Lost & Damned, a creature so old and alien, he lost his humanity a long time ago and never looked back. On the pitch, he’s very cold and calculating. Still, the inability to understand his thought processes renders that moot - nobody knows what his goals are at any given moment - and anything and anyone standing between him and his goal is risking, well… disturbing displays of violence, snacking on lost body parts. Extreme hardiness is what gives him lots of fans on the bleachers. Less so on the opposing teams, but such is life.

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - Boshoi Siblings - the Uncleft

So, Bretonnians turned out rather repetitive, so I did a quick change of pace and returned to my weird Chaos Team, The Lost & Damned.

I already painted the Beastmen, they were the last before the hiatus and they are all a dark and twisted take on both Chaos and Blood Bowl. Now it was time for the Blockers, or Champions as I call them - really useful players that command the lesser creatures around them. Here are the Boshoi siblings, a conjoined monstrosity with the bigger half stoping and chomping all around the pitch (talking too) and the smaller half handling the ball and being the brains of the operation.

This guy was painted the most already and was overall pretty simple, so I chose him first. All the general design ideas about them are in the WIP post to be found HERE. Painting was a joy, I like flesh and there wasn't many differen textures involved. In the end, they turned out almost exactly as I envisioned - I didn't plan for dark teeth, that just happened because of the basecoat and I loved it.

Should the Lost & Damned rely only on their chaotic and unruly beastmen, they could just as well go back to the maelstrom from where they crawled out. The true stars, who carry the team on their shoulders, are the four Champions - the rest of the players are just lowly retinues to them. One, or rather two of them are the Boshoi siblings - a conjoined monstrosity, sharing one body with two eyes, two functional hands, two legs, and one mouth. They work and play as one, a terrifying charger out of your darkest dreams. Contrary to what one may think, they actually enjoy their life, more together than anyone else in the world. Boshoi receive every one of their mutations with fervor and make sure to make a great spectacle for the gods out of everything they do.

Blood Bowl Nurgle Staff - Infectius the Plague Doctor

Now this model was actually painted before my hiatus - and even photographed, but I just couldn't go through yet another round of editing. So, using my new setup, I retook the photos and here he is, sorry for the delay.

The colors were chosen to fit my Putrid Punters, with the notable exception for the white cloak. I painted it this way to make him look just a tiny bit more like your usual doctor. Just in case his helpful nurse, a sign, a doctor's bag weren't enough of a clue. Now he can join the team as the first proper member of the staff - first one of the many more to come!

The WIP for him can be found HERE.

Even if you are not interested in Blood Bowl, Blood Bowl may be interested in you! Such is the life of poor Infectius, a quiet, nerdy boy who always had a passion for all things biological. That evolved later into devoting himself to Nurgle and studying all his diseases and peculiar physiology of his beloved creatures. He would spend the rest of his days cooped up in his laboratory if not a recruitment organized by one of the high-ranking daemons. He wanted to create a guild of Plague Doctors, as a Nurglite alternative to Blood Bowl apothecaries. Being too timid and awkward to refuse, Infectius went with the daemon - and unfortunately for him - proved himself to be an exemplary doctor, being able to patch up even the weirdest of bodies and injuries. Then he got together with the Putrid Punters and the rest is history. The jocks from the team still occasionally make fun of him, but at least they respect him as the last chance to get back, should their regenerative powers fail them. And Infectius, while stressed and anxious most of the time, can at least find some meaning and purpose in his difficult task, which also involves endlessly learning new things about Grandfather Nurgle and his devotees.

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - The Unmade

After way too much time, we're finally at the last duo of weird beastmen - the Unmade (I couldn't find a fitting name that wasn't also the name of a GW Warcry warband...), the beastmen who mutated in ways directly beneficial in Blood Bowl - a very rare sight.

These are the ones that certainly gain the most after painting them - they both have big, creepy eyes on them. That also meant that they were pushed to the very end of my beastmen - I was intimidated by the prospect of painting so many eyes... Thankfully it wasn't as bad as I thought. Besides, painting wood and a lion's face from a photo were some nice changes to the usuals in this project.

The WIP for the left one can be found HERE and the right one HERE.

Most beastmen playing in the Lost & Damned are just random fluctuations of Chaos that had to cope in the new, Blood-Bowl-obsessed world they found themselves in - but some are created special. Those Unmade, were seemingly disassembled by their gods and made anew to carry unique mutations to help them play. It may be an ability to split oneself in two halves to dodge better, an arm mounted on a wheel to help pass farther and or eyes flailing on their nerves to see everyone and everything on the pitch and react accordingly. Still, no matter how useful or skilled they are, they don’t get many fans during their careers - they are literal slaves to their roles, single-mindedly devoted to filling their tasks. What starts with a strong drive and focus, turns later into psychosis. In their final hours, they get so overwhelmed with their specialization, they forget things like walking, seeing, breathing, perishing without understanding anything around them.

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - The Unspent

Fifth group of the bizarre Beastmen. We're leaving the truly malformed ones and moving onto those actually capable of playing like professionals, the Unspent.

The buff "lizardman" on the left is a generic blocker in the team, the only one actually. I decided to go with a healthy-looking, very un-lizardy skintone for him to contrast with the unusual head. The one with the hands-on approach on the right uses the 'Claw' skill - one that's also very useful. I didn't have a dark-brown one in the bunch so far, so he took it up - besides, he's the only one to wear proper Blood Bowl attire - on the hands at least! All in all, a rather straightforward pair.

The WIP for the left one can be found HERE and the right one HERE.

Amongst the menagerie of twisted horrors and miserable mistakes of The Lost & Damned players one do can find some capable ones. Those are usually called the Unspent and are actually able to go toe to toe with professionals. While they may still look bizarre, they either found a way to work around their deficiencies or made a strong point of them, giving their skills an extra edge through surprise. Still, the Unspent have to work extra hard to make up for the rest of the team and no matter how much they may enjoy their ‘glory’, they cannot escape who they are and will be always found by the many blessings of the Chaos Gods sooner or later, losing their skills, popularity and finally - sanity.

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - The Untrue

As promised, here I am again with the usual - some more twisted beastmen for my equally twisted Chaos Blood Bowl team, The Lost & Damned.

Now, those guys were fun - I consider them the least "believable" of the bunch, representing more nightmares given form than just a strange mutated beastmen. The one on the left was 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. I don't have the slightest idea how this creature would even work in reality and I like it like that very much. While the sculpting process was rather complicated, the painting was very straightforward.

The one on the right is almost a random assortment of bits - I didn't plan it, I was just piecing together some newly-bought parts. The final effect looks perhaps less physics-defying than the Flatface, but it's a strange one nontheless. It also turned out quite interesting as a miniature - difficult to understand when viewed only from one angle, which I consider a very fitting feature.

The WIP for the left one can be found HERE and the right one HERE.

Another kind of beastmen employed by the Lost & Damned can be only called the Untrue. They are just wrong, cruel mistakes of fate that managed to take form and escape from the maelstrom of Chaos. Functioning like a glitch in the reality, those saner around them can never relax or think straight - so they are often used by the coach to disrupt their opponent’s gameplan. Still, no matter how the Untrue look or act, they are aware of themselves and their surroundings, possibly even sentient - and that just seems to disturb everyone even more. Then, without any warning, they are called back by their gods and just suddenly blink out of existence and everyone’s minds, like a bad dream in the morning...  

Blood Bowl Chaos Chosen - The Ungraceful

I'm determined to paint, so here are some more of the Lost & Damned beastmen - continuing the darker theme presented HERE at first.

Those guys turned out much more colorful than I anticipated. The snailmen were supposed to have a realistic tone to their shell and somewhat more colorful skin to offset that and create some contrast, but now I think they would work well with black (or generally much darker) skintone too. The other one, the birdman, was inspired by the Skeksis from Dark Crystal and the most recognizable of them, the Chamberlain, had blueish-purple skin, so I went with that to make the connection a bit more recognizable. This also serves as a contrast to more realistically-painted arms that grow out of his hand-sleeves. I hope those two will make the whole team look even less coherent and weird - and I won't have to regret not going full grimdark on them.

The WIPs for both of them can be found HERE.

For the creatures that emerge from the Chaos Wastes, it’s not uncommon for two or more souls to inhabit one body. For Bloodbowl, this naturally means more players for the price of one - which would work really well, if it wasn’t Chaos. Those ‘Ungraceful’ are like writing something with a quill held by many people - their movements are shaky, unsure, forced. It may be several creatures forced into one armor, many body parts growing out of a central ‘torso’ or a body with three different ‘fronts’ and no ‘back’. They may prove themselves useful from time to time, but their life is a constant struggle between the constituent parts of the unfortunate, cursed creature.

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.

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!

Blood Bowl Chaos Pact - Blitzer Marauders

After the most recognizable part of the team - the Renegades, it was time for the cornerstone, the linemen and linewomen - the Marauders.

Seeing as they are supposed to be a rag-tag bunch of mismatched misfits, I decided to play around with the skintones - so everyone's skin is different, both realistic ones and some weird ones. That was both the fun part and the challenge about them, but that's how it is usually. I got a whole 10 of them in the box, so I decided to break them into two groups - both to organize them by their role on the pitch and to fit them reasonably well here. After some tweaking, I chose 5 of them to be the fighty ones and those go in first.

Intent on creating the greatest Chaos team, the goblin headhunter Dugtig gathered the mismatched Renegades and was now faced with finding the marauders somehow. He looked through many of his books and finally found some notes about Kreegans - a travelling band of aggressive Blood Bowl fans. Taking people from all around the world, the Kreegans were united by their love of the noble sport, fondness of riots and pitch invasions, as well as their only vague understanding of the rules. Nobody ever considered recruiting them, but Dugtig was nothing if not unorthodox - while unskilled, their potential was limitless, he thought. The unassuming goblin appeared in one of their camps one day and announced his recruitment - naturally, the response was more than enthusiastic. It was easy to find good violent blitzers - but digging through the applications in search of various specialists would take some extra time.

Here are the girls - and those two were probably the most challenging when it went to their skintone. The one on the left is meant to have a very dark, almost black skin, but with very bright patches caused by vitilgo Vitiligo. I always thought that's a very interesting look and wanted to try it out - and this was the perfect opportunity. The one on the right sports also very dark skin, but warmer in tone - I never painted skin even close to this, so it was also an interesting task.

And here are the guys - your usual brooding agressive types that are well known on the tabletop - with skintones much closer to my usual work - with some tints added. I gave them some simple tattoos to make them stand out just a tiny bit more.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 4

Finally, the last Champion of Chaos is complete - the most flashy and overdesigned of them all, the Snake.

Here the stats came first - this one got blessed with extra agility, giving us something like a nimble elf that can still punch and take hits like a Chaos Warrior. When designing them, I realized that some mutation skills give an equivalent to extra agility for some actions - Two Heads for dodging and Extra Arms for handling the ball - so I decided to merge them all into one and finally be free from the restrictions about the amount of extremities.

This gave us this snake-like monstrosity - inspired by the Naga Queens from HoMM3 and some old Slaaneshi Champions. The central part, the torso-head is a variant of the disturbing babyfaces used on may Inq28 pieces - I used a female vampire head from a bust I won some time ago (I never really expected to paint it). This thing got then decorated with all kinds of details and pieces to make it all complicated and at least a bit bizarre.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 3

Third Blocker is done - and it's actually two Champions of Chaos - the Twins.

I had one of the tough guys planned as the mobile one - then I had to think how to represent him. I went through some iterations, until I finally decided to make a weird 'cavalry' piece. Two conjoined siblings would count as a single player as far as the rules are concerned - allowing me to sculpt something wildly different from the norm. Of course, I had to design them so that I will avoid certain rules - so they only have two functional arms to share between them and only one set of eyes (probably one mouth too). The bottom one is stomping forward and punching, with the one on top concerned only about the occasional ball handling situations. As you can see HERE, I sculpted the big mouth and even every tooth separately, because I was unsure if I wanted them open or closed. I decided on clenched teeth because it was less obvious - most monsters with large mouths tend to keep them open as they run, just ask any squig.

It was a nice project, all the greenstuffed flesh reminded me of the Sloth the Sloth.

Blood Bowl Chaos Pact - Renegades

Finally, something painted and finally, the Chaos Pact team project is starting to emerge! It's been almost 1,5 years after I got them and the WIP was posted in January. I tried working on them bit by bit, but life keeps happening, even now.  

These here are the first members of my Chaos Pact / Chaos Renegades team, part of the Alastoran Malice Team from Greebo Games. The idea behind the team is a mismatched collection of chaos marauders and other races brought together to play the noble sport, a much less elite variant of the Chaos Chosen team. One of their features is access to 3 Big Guys - those are still being painted - and another one is a single orc, skaven, goblin, and a dark elf available in their rosters, each one bringing some nice flavor from their main teams and I decided to start on them.    

There are some small conversions involved - the goblin has a second head behind the first one, the elf has a decoration on his helmet to bind him together with the GW team, orc has some disgusting pustules all over him (to signify Foul Appearance mutation) and the skaven sports some edgy, oversized horns. As for the painting, while I liked painting all the different colors, the models themselves are very fine and sometimes I struggled to recognize what is what - but that's a good thing too, weirdly enough. Their bases are made according to my own tutorial, but perhaps not that well visible from this angle.      

  The first batch of human marauders coming up soon! Click the image for better resolution.

The goblin headhunter Dugtig is well known in the Blood Bowl world for his skill in finding really good players. Still, many talents he discovered were rejected by the coaches because of ‘chaotic influence’, ‘unworkable personality’ or other similar details. Now, after recent difficult recruitment drives for the Dreadspear Dragons, Badlands Badbuttz and Backbiters, to mention a few, he thought that with all the money he earned through the years he could start his own team, taking all those talented, but misunderstood players. Collecting this small group of mismatched rejects, he created a core for a new Chaos Renegades team. Now the real recruitment begins.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 2

Today I want to show you the second blocker - and probably the weirdest of the bunch - the Fishman.

I'm not really sure how this idea came to me and what inspired it, it just happened during one sleepless night earlier during the year. A Champion of Chaos that may look comical, but is actually dangerous and cruel - spindly human legs diappearing inside a metal fish costume with bulging eyes, with a strange head and elongated arms, nobody sure where does the armor creature ends and the armor begins.

Contrary to how simple he may look, he was really tasking for me to sculpt... Different layers of sketches, empty mouth, different parts made separately, only to be glued on later, arms made out of Milliput sticks joined at the joints with wire to set the pose properly, the textured, hammered metal - it was a lot of work and it was probably all my fault. He may have turned out too fat and too big, but I accepted it and I'm happy with him, all things considered.

Blood Bowl Chaos Blockers - WIP 1

With the beastmen done, it's time for the Blockers. They are the four Champions of Chaos that brought their own retinues to form a Blood Bowl team, so they are getting a lot of attention. I am probably overdoing them, they take a lot of time to be done, so I'll be posting them one at a time. Still, I think they deserve it and I'm quite happy with my progress so far.

The first one is probably the simplest - the Marble One. He is a reinvention of an idea back from high school, when I wanted have a Tzeentch champion, whose Chaos Armor manifested as marble skin - soft and nimble when moving, hard and cold when struck. To show off something like that, I wanted a lot of exposed skin with sculpture-like muscles, so I bought myself a Kairic Acolyte body. Sadly, it was way too small for an imposing Champion of Chaos - so I cut the body into pieces, lenghtened it and then basically sculpted the whole body over the original plastic. Trying to sculpt a realistic musculature was a first time for me and I learned a little bit, which is always nice. The head was supposed to be simply helmeted at first, but then I got inspired by the eerie and beautiful marble mines found IRL - so he sports some interlocking blocks of stone for a head, with two little, strange eyeholes.

Painting him will surely be an interesting challenge!