With the Skaven completed I now need to decide what to work on next.

A major amount of my time will be taken up with the new Fumbbl dice.


I’ll be spending the next few months painting them before they are ready to go on sale. See this thread for more details, a timeline, poll and a place to ask questions. Looks like a pretty even split between painted and unpainted so I will only paint half of them. The rest will be left white along with the spares, the good thing is I can quickly paint them up if needed.

Even with the workload being cut in half this is not the most thrilling project and I need something else to help break up the tedium.

There are a number of options to consider.

Probably the simplest would be to paint up some star players, there are 18 I still have to do and 12 of them are undercoated ready to go. Painting a star normally takes a couple of weeks, the hardest part is usually thinking of a colour scheme and a suitable amount of painted decoration to add. Last summer I was able to complete half a dozen stars, some to match previous teams I had done and others just for the fun of it. That is the best thing about stars, I can do 1 or 2 of them at a time so they are not a large time commitment. This will allow me to take on new projects easily if I need to or just paint at a more leisurely pace if the summer is nice.

One star I will certainly be doing is Grim Ironjaw, who I’ll be painting up for the TFF Legacy team.

He’s a very simple conversion of the plastic dragonslayer with his weapons and display base chopped off and his arm and shoulder pad from a Dwarf elite. Forgeworld have just released a new version of Grim, but I am not a fan so won’t be using him.

Quite a few of the outstanding stars I would like to keep for teams I am considering doing in the future, which does limit my choices. I could also paint up stars with a new team, with them all following a similar theme and colour scheme.

The NAF have asked me to once again paint a team for them as a prize for the 2018 GT. This year they changed things and the team was randomly awarded rather than going to the overall champion. With that change comes another, gone was the sole restriction to only do the tier 1 teams. More detail along with pics of the teams I am considering can be seen on TFF, there is another poll there too and any suggestions or feedback are welcome.

I am still mulling over ideas at the moment, the 2 front runners at present are Norse and Ogres, but it is still early days and new releases over the summer may take my eye.

Norse
These were almost the team I went with for 2017. I have bought most of the parts I need and am basing them on the plastic Bloodreavers, with characters as the berserkers and throwers, Wulfen as Ulfwereners and a Yheti as snow troll. I do still need to decide how best to differentiate the positionals from each other and what to do for the runners.
A key advantage is I have already built Boomer, Icepelt and Helmut ready to paint and completed Wilhelm last year in colours I think would be perfect for the team.




Ogres
Ogres are one of only 2 teams I have never painted up, making them an even more attractive option. Like the Norse I have already acquired most of the parts I’d need and made test models. I do still need to decide what to do with snotlings, the 2nd edition models are nice but so small they’d be hard to convert.
Over the past 2 weeks I finished converting 2 key stars that represent the team perfectly. Brick & Grotty along with Big Bertha, so that would be some more from the stars list done.





The final option is to write more articles for the NAF, I have already done; converting Blood Bowl teams, positionals, stars and bases. I’d like to finish off the conversions with a last article on the peripheral models (coaching staff, markers and inducements). My own collection of pictures is a bit lacking since only a handful of the commissions I did included these. However I hit upon the idea of sourcing pictures from the community, to both save me time and add a lot more variety so may well do that.
The final article would be on choosing colour schemes and should really have been the first I did, though a section of it was featured in an old blog of mine. The main issue was I needed to paint up pairs of models to illustrate certain points. Having bought the new boxed set I now have plenty of models I can use as I will likely not do a 4th Orc team, nor use the humans without heavy conversions.