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.

Blood Bowl Chaos Beastmen - WIP 1

Today I'm starting with a project that was brewing in my head since April at least - a very bizarre Chaos Blood Bowl team. Long have I admired all the brilliant conversions inspired by the Inq28 style, Lost&Damned books, medieval, baroque art, and many more - creating a blend when there's no place for common sense or logic. I never had any good excuse to try doing something similar - until I realized that the simple roster for the Chaos Chosen team would be a perfect canvas for such an endeavor. Such a take on Blood Bowl is not very common, which was an additional plus.  

I am starting with the beastmen - slowly, those kitbashes take much more time than I'm willing to admit. There are a lot of them and their ruleset is simple - some hands to handle the ball and horns, everything else is up for a conversion - a perfect canvas for my menagerie! The one on the left is probably the one that started it all - a running Chaos Giant's head. The conversion was simple and the addition of helmet easily makes this model 'sporty'. At first, I intended for his hand to emerge from his mouth, but I had others with this trick planned and that would interfere with the mask. So, he got thin limbs with arthropod joints dangling about as he runs about.  

The one on the right was invented when I was trying out all the bits that I bought for this project - I wanted a lizardman head on a buff torso - because beastmen shouldn't be only goats! Thin legs from a ghoul came much, much later - they serve as a nice deformed contrast with the rest of the body. Stay tuned for more.

The Lady's Favor

More Bretonnians from ye olden times to pass the time - and today, a Trebuchet! A beautiful model, I'm happy I was about to get it when it was still being sold.

Bought in 2007 (for my 18th birthday!) and painted in 2010, this was my first warmachine ever - and I wanted to do it justice with a proper scenic base. I made it out of an MDF board - all the crewmen and the trebuchet itself are removable. I'm pretty satisfied with it - nowadays I would add freehands on the little shields and avoid making those hard-cut stones on the edge of the base.

Unlike most Bretonnian lords, Crinierre is quite a progressive person, enjoying new inventions and innovations. That’s why he was always keen on employing war machines in his forces - and after getting a team of engineers from the Empire and traditional Bretonnian architects, he built himself a trebuchet. Manned by outlanders, fashioned to look like a cathedral, and even called ‘The Lady’s Favor’, it causes more traditional lords to talk about blasphemy. Still, even those disgruntled nobles are forced to admit the contraption’s merits when they see it working on the battlefield - and seeing them jealous makes the whole endeavor even more worth it to Crinierre!

Blood Bowl Human Blitzers - WIP

Okay, those here took me a LOT of time...  

When I was converting the Pestigors for my Nurgle Blood Bowl Team, I bought myself a generic Chaos team. 4 Beastmen got convinced to work for Nurgle and another 4 were reserved for another project - which left me with 4 Blockers. After a bit of thinking, I decided to turn them into Blitzers for my Human/Bretonnian Team. This would both give me the whole allowance for Blitzers and make them much more distinct - the original ones relied on helmets to make them recognizable, which fails when I changed all of their heads... Thankfully the blockers are not mutated, not very spiky and up for a conversion - I envisioned them as some weird ubermensch Bretonnian nobles, not needing full armor when they have muscles!      

Then, the whole process began... I filed down the bracers on of them, then left the project for a week. Then I swapped the head on another one. Two weeks pause. New hands for that one - and a week of something else later - you can see where it goes. I don't even know why it turned out like this. In the end, more than 50% of the work was done in one week, after many months after starting. Oh well.      

The first two are here. The one on the left has some enhanced knuckles, with 4THE LADY engraved on them, to leave a Bretonnian mark on every fool they punch - that's Mighty Blow. The second one sports a big shield on his helmet - that's a Guard skill.

And the second pair. The one on the left sports some horns and a skull - because chivalrous doesn't mean nice - he has Frenzy. The other one has a hand on his helmet - and that's Sure Hands obviously. The spike on his bracer is also a Fleur-de-lys, I found a single, last one amongst my Bretonnian bits - so here it goes.