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, Knight of the Realm Gallant

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.

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.