Tutorial - Simple Display Bases

It's a known truth in the hierarchy of miniatures that a painted miniature trumps an unpainted one. A nicely based miniature is better than a painted green slottabase. And miniatures ALWAYS look better in decent scenery or a diorama*
*true fact

Don't believe me? Check out Eldar v Squats from p180 of the Rogue Trader rulebook.

Skaven Blood Bowl Team Retrospective - Part 2, Painting the Team

In September I unveiled Part 1 in my Skaven Blood Bowl team retrospective; a very enjoyable exercise in converting and modernising Jes Goodwin's fantastic 1988 Skaven models.

When I finally got round to thinking about the paint scheme for the team, I wanted to select something with a lot of visual presence. Skaven always seem to work well with nice bright colour schemes on their gear, in contrast the the natural skin and fur tones. I set to work with an online colour wheel tool to see what I could come up with.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

 

Taking the Dark Path

Last year I made a heavily converted Skaven Blood Bowl team to take to the NAF 2013 Blood Bowl Tournament in Nottingham. Next year, the tournament falls on 17/18 May and I've been working on a new team to play with; this time it's Dark Elves.


I don't believe that either the Perrys' 2nd edition Dark Elves or Gary Morley's 3rd edition Dark Elves make the grade, especially when compared against Jes Goodwin's 2nd edition Elves.

1988 Dark Elves. Just a little dumpy and short-legged for my taste!

Mid-1990s Dark Elves, more dyanmic, but with rather large feet & hands.

1988 Blood Bowl Elves. Just fabulous!

Blood Bowl "Micro-ramas"

Blood Bowl is a game characterised by dyanmic rules, with models that represent elite athletes. What could be more cinematic than the all or nothing play, where a spilled ball by the opposition near your line is dramatically picked up by your star thrower under pressure. He evades clutching hands and diving tackles to sprint up field. A crazy long bomb pass miraculously lands in the hands of your waiting catcher who surges to the line to score.

And your star thrower looks like this:

Skaven and Human throwers hope to out point each other

Tutorial - Converting Complex Figures

Up until a couple of years ago the extent of converting I did on models was fairly minimal; a weapon swap here and there. Maybe a head swap if it wasn't too difficult. I rarely did anything complex, so there was little in the way of planning involved.

More recently I've been doing a lot more advanced conversions, in some cases involving parts from 5 or 6 different models. With that level of work and commitment to chopping up nice old lead, I've starting implementing a bit of a structured approach to converting my models, illustrated by the image below, which is a walkthrough of the process involved for one of my Gutter Runners for my Skaven Blood Bowl team:

My 'Bring Out Your Lead' Experience

It was with great sadness that at 1.20pm on Saturday 31st August I departed the Oldhammer 'Bring out your lead' event at Foundry. As I left, Tony Hough was in full swing talking through his fabulous portfolio, Padre was co-ordinating some dispicable pygmy action in the Rumble in the Jungle game, and the whole venue was a riot of miniatures not seen on a table-top for several decades.

Tony Hough (L) enthralls Orlygg (R)

Skaven Blood Bowl Team Retrospective - Part 1, Building the Team

Back in April 2012, I converted up a Skaven Blood Bowl player , converted from a couple of Skaven and the Chaos Star Bilerot Vomitflesh. He very quickly became known as Fat Rat; here's why:



He's not fat, just big boned!

Fat Rat started the seed of something...I decided I wanted to make a Skaven Blood Bowl team. Not just any old team you understand, but a team where every model is different and unique!