The orc team has been completed and safely made its way to Jan in Italy. The conversion work was not too complicated and Jan gave me lots of useful feedback on what he was after so I was able to get them done in a very short amount of time.
Having painted 3 orc teams now I doubt I will be doing them again for many years, though goblins do have some possibilities...



This time last year I had 5 projects lined up and it required a lot of effort to get them all done. I probably took on too much and this year have scaled things back a bit, my last outstanding project is the first prize for the NAF GT. May is rapidly approaching though and it is time for me to make a start on the team.
After much deliberation I have settled on Lizardmen and been making good progress with assembling them ready to paint in March.




These skinks are from the Terradons and their poses are ideal to look like they crouched down and ready to dash forward. They needed virtually no conversion, just a repositioning of 1 arm or hand swap. They are slightly refined from my previous blog.



I also acquired the priest bodies from the stegadon which had loin cloths and some added jewellery, they were in rather static poses but I like them being a little more clothed than the standard ones. Their poses suit skinks who are in the open, either marking opposing players or in space looking to exploit holes in opposing defences.



Thanks to some bits sites having sales I had managed to get my hands on a bunch of other parts that would allow me to make 3 other interestingly posed skinks. They are in running poses, dashing forward to take on the other team or escape nasty MB tackle players.

One key issue is to make the skinks look like a coherent team, as they are rather savage it is appropriate for them to have a fair degree of diversity in equipment. I plan on giving them all a single kroot shoulder pad for coherency and adding player numbers. But as skinks are versatile I quite like the idea of them being themed to runner, blitzer or receiver types.


I already had a good design for the Saurus as shown in the previous blog so see little reason to change it. Their poses will end up being very similar but I don’t think I’ll be able to easily alter them. The 40mm bases will be replaced though as whilst they look cool the overlap makes it hard to play.



Much as I like those saurus I do hate to repeat myself, so have already changed the style of loincloths from using the cleaner dire avenger ones to a more brutal dark eldar warrior source. The player above have shoulder pads from normal lizardmen or orcs, but I am favouring a change from that style to something more modern.

The models in the middle and right in the pic below use dwarf shoulder pads which look very much like those actually used American football armour. Plus they have a weird sort of chest plate that could be a big scale or used as body armour by repainting it and adding some greenstuff. Lots of the models have a large plate over their top backspine and this combined with the shoulder pad could resemble 1 piece of modern American football body armour.
Another option would be to add a face guard to their helmets in imitation of those used on American football helmets. It’s a tricky balancing act between looking too modern and appearing little different from their fantasy battle equivalents.



The Kroxigor was the biggest change, I wanted something quite different and imposing and really liked the design of the Gorebeast. The gorillaesque pose made him look strong and brutal, but fast enough to warrant his MA6. The beast’s skin was more tough and leathery like a rhino rather than scaly, but that would be easy to rectify by adding greenstuff scales on his back. Most of the skin was covered with armour and that would greatly reduce the amount of time needed to sculpt it. I had some added help as my bits hoarding paid off once again, a spare set of dragon ogre legs was an ideal source of not only the prehensile tail he lacked but also some back spines complete with scales.
His armour did have some chaos stars that would need to be cut off or filled in, but that was simple enough.



I always like to do star players that best represent the team. For Lizardmen this is definitely Slibli and Hemlock since they are a saurus and skink. I could have done the others but they were all slaan, human or an ogre so didn’t really fit in. Luckily I had 2 ideal models in the shape of the Carnasour riders. They just needed their weapons removed and a small adjustment to flatten their feet out. I am considering giving Hemlock some shoulder pads as well.