The vast majority of my painting/modelling time over the summer was devoted to dealing with the fumbbl dice. With them all posted, I was looking for a project to fill up the rest of the year before I start work on the 2019 NAF GT team.

Purplechest got in touch and asked me to make a chaos dwarf team for him. I’d previously painted a team of the classic GW 3rd edition chaos dwarfs and converted another from a mix of GW and other figures for Topper in 2013. Luckily there are quite a few good alternative teams out there as well as conversion potential. Most importantly PC wanted purple to be used in the colour scheme, which gave me an excuse to avoid the same old red, black and gold.

We looked at lots of different teams and conversion ideas before settling on the Bull Warriors by Gaspez Arts. These are a really nice and characterful team that would fit in well with the new larger scale boards. Unfortunately only the big hat versions were available for those who’d missed out on the kickstarter. I tried chopping the hats down and even making tops from plasticard, but these attempts all looked really odd or were still too big. To fix this I got rid of the hats entirely and sculpted on football style helms, for the most part copying the designs of the alternative kickstarter heads.




Team will have 6 blockers, 2 Bull centaurs, 6 hobgoblins and a minotaur, in addition there will be a coach, apoth, Zzharg and Hthark.
I’m also going to be converting one of the hobgoblins into Rashnak backstabber, adding a cloak, knife and mask.

For the colour scheme the one requirement was that purple needed to be used. I really like the GW colour Naggaroth Night and so that was the basecoat, adding light blue and pink for highlights. Chaos dwarfs should still look dark and didn’t think all purple armour would look good, so kept the chest and leg armour black.
Looking at the colour scheme of the example dwarfs they had a lot of yellow on them, so much so that it rather overloaded the model. I’d already avoided this somewhat by removing the hats, but I still wanted to ensure the models weren’t too bright. One way to do this was painting some of the edging silver, whilst the rest of these parts I went with a light green, but painted it in a similar way to NMM style using very severe shading and highlights. The aim was to get a good balance between keeping the evil industrial theme of the chaos dwarfs and an eye catching sporting team which would look good on the table.




This was the first test model, he’s still needs a few details added and maybe some tweaks. Once finalised, the rest of the dwarfs will be painted in a similar way. For the hobgoblins I intend their uniform colours to be a little duller as they have a lot less armour and they will have brighter skin, possibly a dirty orange.

The other project I’ve been working on is converting some of the new star players added in the Spike magazines. I’ve long wanted to paint up every team and star player in the game and was just 2 teams and 10 stars away under the CRP system. But with each of the teams in these magazines having 10 stars in means lots of new ones are being added and very few of them have official models yet. Usually all I have to go on is a description and drawing, though in some cases looking at the stats and skills gives an indication of how the player should look, most notably mutations and secret weapons.

Tolly Glocklinger

Secret weapon wielding stars are some of the easiest to convert, all you need is to make their weapon really prominent. Any Nurgle model holding a giant bell would suffice, but the Putrid Blightkings have a perfect model to use as the basis for the conversion. The drawing of Tolly has him with an exposed midriff and the Blightking model does have this as an option. Instead I used the one with an open wound in his guts which had a bell in the middle, liking that more. I added a right arm and shoulder pads from a bloater to better resemble a Blood Bowl player. The only moderately complicated part was adding spikes to the bloater head to make it better match the drawing. I decided to leave the face bar in place as I liked that.



Mordrix Hex
There’s not much in her info to differentiate her from other witch elves or Roxanna unless you want to try and model an old lady witch elf. Fortunately the drawing bears a close resemblance to the Slaughterqueen from the cauldron of blood. I was able to buy this off e-bay for not too much, but that model was rather static and holding a weapon. I like the pose of player to fit their role and witch elves certainly look better when charging forward. I’d bought the Khinerai heartrenders specifically to use for the basis of conversions and used one of them for the body of Mordrix. Getting the arms right proved to be tricky as they kept clashing with her hair, in the end parts were taken from dark elf linemen.