With the Lizardman team safely completed in time for the NAF GT I have found myself with a rare bit of breathing space. At one stage I had pledged myself over a year in advance with future projects and was completing a team every 2-3 months.

So I’m scaling back a bit and taking a look at the teams and stars I have still yet to do, this is 3 teams (Vamps, Ogres and Slann) and half the stars (28).

I have been steadily acquiring models and bits that I think would be suitable to create the outstanding stars. There are also some stars that I themed to certain teams and would like to create more generic versions. In many cases there are existing GW models that represent those stars, if I am a fan of the model then I will use that. I have decided to clean up and assemble some of these stars to give me a break from painting up teams. Some will be painted to fit with teams I have done before whilst others will be done in colours schemes I feel suit the model.



I had already done a lot of the Dwarf stars but thought my Flint and Grim conversions were a bit too specialised. Luckily GW produce some excellent models for these. Both Flint and Barik have 2nd edition models and Boomer can be represented with the 5th edition Dwarf Bomber. The 3rd Edition Grim is ok, but I wanted something a bit more dynamic, fortunately GW have released a very cool plastic slayer model that was ideal. All I needed to do was add a shoulder pad and replace his axes with a bare hand and gauntlet. Despite it looking cool, a large lump of rubble didn’t really fit a Bloodbowl pitch (even a troll fan would struggle to throw a rock that size) so I trimmed that down and he’s now leaping off the ground.



I was very happy with the Khemri team I did for the GT in 2013, combining Necrons and Tomb Kings models kept an ancient Egyptian look whilst giving them “realistic” Bloodbowl armour. I managed to paint up Ramtut to accompany this team but ran out of time to paint up other stars. I did still have loads of suitable parts and with them was able to build Setekh and Humerus. Continuing with the undead theme, Wilhelm Chaney was easy as I already had the excellent 2nd edition model. J Earlice was trickier as I wanted to make a ghoul that would stand out, but still look like a catcher. I am a big fan of the ghoul king model from the Zombie Dragon/Terrorgiest and was able to buy him online. With some simple repositioning of his right arm, head and left leg I made him look to be jumping up to catch a thrown pass. Adding a couple of shoulder pads helped make him look more like a Bloodbowl player.



Skaven are well supplied with stars having 5 that are of their race. Unfortunately only underworld can utilise any of these so there is less cause to paint them up. The 3rd edition Hakflem is an ok model, his main calling card is his mutations so any 2 headed, extra armed prehensile tailed gutter runner would suffice. I haven’t been able to come up with a better unique model so settled on the existing one. The Fantasy special character Deathmaster snitch is ideal to be used as Skitter with no conversion needed. Fezglitch is meant to be a plague censer bearer, there are a few models that can be used for this, but none were quite right. In the end I went for the plague priest and gave him a new head, an extra censer and added a shoulder pad.I am considering painting up a skaven team for the 2016 NAF GT, so may leave these stars to go with that team.



The 5th edition versions of Griff and Zug are both nice models so didn’t need any changes, though I do prefer the alternative unreleased Zug model.



I really like the plastic Shadowblade model and think he is ideal to represent Horkon with the only change being chopping his display base down. I think the 3rd edition Jordell model is a bit on the bland side and the 5th edition version is one of the worst models GW has ever produced. I therefore decided to create my own version, luckily I had a great looking wardancer to use as the basis in the shape of the Warhammer quest model. I had originally planned to just chop his swords off, but that was a bit static. In the end I removed his entire arms and replaced them with those from dark elder, I swapped his legs with those from a Harlequin to give him a leaping pose and added a shoulder pad.



The last group of stars falls into the miscellaneous category. I wasn’t a huge fan of GW’s Yheti’s, nor the alternative models out there. Instead I got myself a Clawed fiend from the Dark Eldar range, sadly it is finecast so will need a lot of work to fix all the air bubbles. I left the tail off as that didn’t seem to fit in with a snow troll and added shoulder pads and loin cloth to Bloodbowl him up a bit. I like the many fanged mouth of the fiend, but was less keen on the 3 pairs of eyes and the lack of nose wasn’t Trolly enough. To rectify this I swapped in some facial features from a plastic river troll.

A lot of people use the hobgoblin sneaky gits as Rashnak, these are a little too similar to the normal Bloodbowl hobgoblins for my tastes. I had acquired the goblins backstabbers and these had some great looking arms and cloaks that really suited an assassin type. It required a lot of work to carve out all the goblin bits and trim down the hobgoblin body but was worth it. He’s ended up a bit smaller than a normal hobgoblin, but I think that is appropriate as being smaller he’d get picked on so would need an extra advantage in the shape of his knives and is also harder to spot.

The last model is Lottabottol, as I’m planning on using Bloodletters as normal slann blitzers I went for the herald as a star player version. I removed the skulls from his feet as they were a bit excessive along with the khornate symbol on his thigh armour and swapped his sword hand for that from the plastic orc thrower. His head is a genestealer with eyes from the chaos spawn.

With the skaven being put aside this gives me 15 stars to paint up over the summer, I have a lot more freedom with colours schemes which is good. However In cases where the players are unique conversions and star versions of existing positionals like Grim and Jordell I will need to ensure they stand out.

There are other stars that I still need to do, but these require some more bits and possibly a team to go with them. I also would like to redo some of the stars I have already done and make a more generic version.



I have also been looking at other teams I’d like to paint up that I have already done. In some cases these were heavily themed or were just a paint job with little conversion work.

One such team is chaos, I did a slaanesh team made entirely from 3rd edition Warhammer models. I was happy with them but there is still plenty of scope to explore with them. I have been playing with the idea of doing a Khorne themed team using the juggernaut riders, the difficult part was finding suitable legs. With the release of the *name* models I had the perfect source and have got myself a couple of pairs. The test warrior looks really good and it would be easy to make another 3 warriors to go with him. I also have ideas for making an interesting minotaur, possibly using some of the juggernaut parts. For the beastmen I was thinking of using bloodletters and that got me thinking about the khorne daemons team.

It would be possible to make both teams with only a few extra models, 2 of the warriors could be armoured bloodletters to work as Heralds. I could make 4 normal bloodletters as beastmen and the rest being cultists with khorne style horned helmets. The mino/bloodthirster could be a large horned daemon prince of khorne.

I’m in 2 minds of this as it risks being rather weak attempt to make 2 teams as 1 rather than doing 2 full teams well.

The final thing I am working on is something new and a bit different, my first diorama. Below is a very rough test model where I am trying to get the placing right for the scene.