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 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!

Viktor von Greifen, Captain of the Prenzlauer Guard - WIP

The Prenzlauer Guard are one of the oldest miniatures that I have in my undead collection - which means that they grew to look a bit dated to me - and I think about repainting them to my current standards from time to time. This would mean not painting new things and not moving forward, so I never actually did it. An opportunity showed itself when I found a Chaos Lord horse cheaply on ebay - it has a similar style to the Chaos Knights that I used last time, so it was perfect. Besides, I love that model. I decided to kitbash on it a leader for that unit, allowing me to try doing another take on a chaos-based-vampire.

In the end, the kitbash ended looking very similar to the original Lord - he is made mostly out of Skullcrusher bits, with a head from the Terrogheist kit, a big hammer and a shield and a cloak (which will be on the next installment of Sculpting Tips). After starting with Instagram I also found tons of cool kitbashing inspiration - and that's why he has so many little details hanging around, I love that style. It's still quite reserved, though - I will try doing something much more cluttered in the future.

Blood Bowl Big Guy - Sloth the Sloth, the Rotspawn

There was the WIP Post and a long Step-by-step sculpting process, now it's finally time to finish this project and post the painted version of my (mostly) scratchbuilt Blood Bowl Nurgle Rotspawn, the cute Sloth the Sloth.

I painted him in the same color scheme as his teammates, only this time flesh was the overwhelming majority of everything that was to paint. To make it more interesting, I tried varying the shades on him - with some parts redder, some greener, some darker and duller. To further that, I also freehanded some fine veins in some places, like on the boils and the bulbous part of the main tentacle. Then I applied some gloss varnish on all the swollen fleshy bubbles, tentacles and the eyes - especially the eyes - and he was basically ready. Green shirt, bony spikes and black armor were just accents here. In the end, I am pretty happy with him and I hope I can mess with some elven game plans with him now!

His name was taken from my version of Putrid Punters that I had in Blood Bowl 1 video game - the names are randomly generated there and the Beast rolled a coincidentally redundant name, so I decided to keep it because it fits and it's funny - also as a memento from those times.

All the design principles and ideas for this creature are explained in the WIP post, linked above but also HERE.

Weirdly named (Nurgle himself choose it, who are we to argue?) Sloth the Sloth is the Punters’ Rotspawn - and as his name suggests, he is always a little late after the team’s reappearance in the world. But once he shows up, the game starts for real - for the creature is known for his affectionate character, stealing the hearts of the audiences with his antics and gluing the opposing team to the pitch with his friendly licks. So determined he is in his need for pats and love, he can force his way through the blocks of less experienced players! Sadly, Sloth’s heart is really vulnerable to rejection, making him whine and sob in the middle of the field - so he almost always needs his teammates nearby to assure him that he’s a good boy.

Blood Bowl Nurgle Team - Rotspawn WIP

The mighty Bloaters, the 'fast' Pestigors and the fragile Rotters are painted, but a Nurgle team is nothing without the Beast (or a Rotspawn as it is called now)! There are the official one from Forge World, GW minis that can be repurposed and many other third-party options, but I couldn't find one that I really liked. The obvious solution in this situation was to make my own from scratch! I have been sculpting Nurgle guts on existing minis for a long time now, so this shouldn't be that much more difficult.

First design principle was to make it 'ugly cute', like HERE - the picture that inspired me the most. Beasts of Nurgle always had the background of having a puppy-like mentality and I wanted to show this quality, despite the 'official' art direction for new Rotspawn. To achieve that, I gave it large, round eyes - which will be painted glossy black - to get that 'puppy eyes' effect and a wide grin with tongue sticking out. During the sculpting process, I also decided to make its face flat and with many folds to make it similar to a pug. The arms are also posed like that to get that 'pet animal' effect.

The second design principle was to make the tentacle really important. In the game, the 'Tentacle' mutation that the Rotspawn possesses from the start dictates it's the whole role on the pitch and plays a giant role in the whole team's strategy - and most miniatures used for this creature have their tentacles stuck to the head or the back, almost like an afterthought. I wanted this sticky appendage to be an integral part of the whole miniature - so I designed it as an extension of the beast's head, the tentacle IS its head! Only from that main one smaller ones grow out to make the whole composition more wriggly and untidy.

Other than that, it was your usual Nurgle pleasantness, with open wounds, sucktion cups, toothy maws, spikes, boils and many similar. In the end, only the pauldrons, three spikes on the back, a nurgling on the side and two maws are made out of existing bits, all the rest was sculpted by me - I used all the greenstuff that I had on hand at that time. I am pretty happy with this result and now I can't wait to put some equally sick colors on it!

Before I started all the greenstuffing, I did a plasticine 3d-sketch, to get the scale and proportions right. I still had it after the finished model was done, so I made a comparison photo of them together - I find it interesting to see how different and yet similar they are.

Zombie Legion - Idol Statues

Part of the Zombie Legion

When I was at the end of my zombie-building process, when I was completely out of suitable models and cool ideas, I filled the missing places with those statues. I planned it like that since the beginning - seeing as those are scratchbuilt, I needed only milliput, greenstuff and a free base - I could easily make them exactly as much as needed. They would also help to bring this chaotic mass of corpses a little bit closer to the Slavic theme of this force.

I thought I would make them stand alone on those 40mm bases, but they would become either way too thick or the base seemed empty. That's why the three ones seen on the top of the picture got a single zombie each to make them a little bit crowdier. Two below are kinda opposite - I wanted both the spider and the whipper to stand on something that would elevate them and those wooden idols were a much better idea than using a simple, boring stone. The minis were there first, statues came later.

I will make a tutorial in the future about building and painting those.

Giant sculptures depicting old gods, heroes and ancestors, carved out of whole tree trunks are a common sight in the Varsavian wilderness - it’s difficult to move through the land without stumbling upon at least one of them. Despite their true meaning becoming mostly forgotten today, the villagers still care for those idols - not wanting to anger the old spirits and being somehow proud of their old cultural heritage, something that makes them different from other people of Kislev. Boyars tend to ignore this sentiment because the villagers still pay their taxes and it's much better than worshipping Chaos.

Side Project - Christmas Present

And now a little side project - minis I sculpted for my girlfriend back in December 2013. I post it here as a curiosity mainly because these were the first minis I sculpted from scratch ever - well, save for the weapons. It was also the first time I painted something more contemporary than the usual fantasy stuff. Here they are before painting:

And after painting: