I’ve not heard about any missing dice and enough time has passed to put the spares up on e-bay. The first batch includes 2 sets of black and one of red, orange, purple, white and a set of individual dice. e-bay

There’s still few more sets and I’ll put those up later in the month and then make the site donation.



After having spent several weeks painting nothing but stars and arrows over the summer I was keen to get back to working on models again.

Several new teams have been released this year, along with the accompanying Spike magazines and all these had new stars in them. I also want to finish off all the crp teams and stars before getting too distracted by the new releases and some of the old faces are deleted from the rules. I’ve just got a Vampire team and the following 4 stars to go; Icepelt, Boomer, Sinnedbad and Crazy Igor.

I have been working on a vampire team for a while, with the idea of them being a baroque style Lahmian team. The Coven throne supplied bodies for 3 vamps and I have found other sources for bodies which match that style. For the legs I like the idea of using Khinerai Heartrenders and long flowing skirts sculpted or cast from greenstuff to appear almost floating.

What has given me the most pause was finding thralls that would be clearly different from the vamps and also fit the theme. One idea was foppish dandies, enthralled by the vampiric beauties, another was emaciated underlings, already part drained of blood. The idea which I liked best was that they would be handmaids, young maidens who would wait on their masters, and be the occasional food source in the hope of receiving the kiss.

The Escher gang members could be a source of legs and heads, daemonettes used for torsos thanks to the corsets and the new wood elves have arms of a matching scale.

Ideally I’d like to do a full team of 16 with a ballroom style display base with black and white marble slaps as the squares.





For the outstanding stars, I already have models ready for Boomer and Icepelt which just leaves 2 to go.


Sinnedbad
The background for Sinnedbad is that he’s a skeleton pirate with a sword for an arm, based on Sinbad the Sailor. There are some pretty wacky stars and teams out there which use other models for the basis for cool and unique conversions. Something I always find important is that conversions should look like Blood Bowl players, even just the addition of a shoulder pad or other piece of armour can go a long way to help with this.

Most of the undead GW range is pretty old, but there was a Shadespire faction that came out with some nice dynamic skeleton models. I used one of these as the basis for the conversion. His head, left arm and right hand were removed and his shoulder sanded down to make space for a shoulder pad. I then swapped in the left arm of a Blood Bowl skeleton, a khemri spear blade in place of his right hand and the head from another skeleton. The top of this was trimmed down and a bandana from an old Empire free company fighter was attached.

This gave a dynamic conversion with some BB kit and should very clearly stand out as a star on the board.





Gretchen Wachter “The Blood Bowl Widow”
I was a bit stuck with what to for Igor and the new stars had some really cool designs and I couldn’t wait to start work on them. Gretchen Wachter was the first conversion, she’s a banshee and I already had that model since the corset would be suitable for vampires. The lower body was ideal for the ghostly appearance and the face would be good for the ear piercing scream.

The illustration shows her having armour equivalent to normal human players as the fluff states she was buried in a replica kit worn over a scrawny body. For this I used the Bb Ghoul torso and carved off the armour, replacing it with a cast of the chestplate from a human lineman. By casting it I was able to trim parts off and then bend it round the skinnier frame of the ghoul body. I did the same with her thigh armour, but used actual human shoulder pads, since these were easy to trim. Her arms were from crypt ghouls and her hair from a daemonette.





Gloriel Summerbloom
One annoying thing about the illustrations of the stars in Spike magazine is that all too often a large portion is obscured by stats or text. This is a real shame as there are some wonderful drawings of them and a lot are new, which means that is all we have to go on aside from a small bit of descriptive text.

Thankfully there is an almost full page drawing of Gloriel in the Wood Elf Spike. I noticed that the drawing bears a close resemblance to the new plastic models, although her equipment matches a few different positonals. This was the basis for the conversion, I used the torso of the thrower and legs of the catcher models. With arms taken from other players. The hardest part was finding a source for the long platted hair, thankfully the Warcry range had just come out and the leader of the Cypher Lords had a perfect decorative bit of hair to use. They were cool models anyway and also came with a loin cloth I could add to her rear.

Some repositioning and filling was needed to get her closer to the pose in the picture. I added the flowers and vines using greenstuff, which was another useful way to hide joins, though it did test my rather limited sculpting skills.





Bulla Shardhorn
It’s about time the bestmen got a star player. It was a bit disappointing that in the Chaos Chosen Spike magazine it was mostly humans stars or weird mutants, more in keeping with Chaos renegades.

The good thing about mutant players is that you don’t have to worry about matching the illustration as much and can focus on creating the key identifying characteristics. For Bulla these are; a 2nd head that split off from the first, a right arm that shrivelled up and was replaced by multiple other arms and very jagged horns that can be used to stab other players.

The pestigor model was the obvious choice a starting point for this model, his right hand even had weird fingers that looked a lot like those on the small original arm in the illustration. I had planned on using the 2 pestigor heads, but was finding it difficult to model the split. It was then I happened across the Tzaangor boxed set, I’d already thought about getting them in case I decided upon a Tzeentch themed chaos team. That set came with a mutant beastman which had his face split in two, which was ideal for Bulla.

I used this along with one of the Pestigor and a normal beastman head along with a lot of greenstuff to get the split face. The extra arms came from my bits box with the shrivelled arm being from a nurgling.

Horns were taken from normal beastmen and the pestigor back spikes to best match the illustration. As there were lots of parts and greenstuff on the model I added some warts and boils to hide gaps and avoid his skin looking too smooth, since his diseases are particularly virulent even for nurgle.






Big Jobo Hairyfoot
Halflings are tricky to convert, the main issue being that they have so few alternatives that fit the GW scale. They haven’t had much model support for WHFB/AoS in years and their only representation for 40K is Ratlings.

This meant I had to mostly rely on using the new plastic kit and greentsuff to convert Jobo. To this end I focused on recreating the illustration as much as possible, trying to match the position as well as appearance.

His main characteristic is being large, even for a halfling. This meant the hefty torso was ideal for him and I used the catcher legs to match his running pose. The hefty bodies didn’t have the right closing, so I cast a waistcoat from another model and sculpted the braces and bare belly with some hair on it.

The hefty heads were not a good match, instead I used the catcher head and chopped the sock off and replaced it with a pot. A double (triple) chin was sculpted on and sideburns and hair added. I then sculpted on a chin strap to hold on the pot.

The arms came from hopefuls and as he only had a right shoulder pad I sculpted the shoulder of his left arm. It appears in the drawing that he is holding a club and I took one from a Gnoblar, which is appropriate as he not only comes with dirty player, but can play for ogre teams too.





There are a couple more stars I am working on and hope to finish soon. After that I want to paint up Boomer, Icepelt and Sinnedbad before starting work on the NAF GT 2020 team.