For this year’s NAF Championship prize team I will be doing humans. They are a solid team at low TV and reasonably competitive in leagues, which means hopefully they will prove useful to the winner of them. I decided to adopt a similar approach to the skaven team I did back in 2017. Using the new plastics from GW and converting any duplicates to ensure all players would be unique. I already had a squad of 12 from the boxed set as well as lots of stars from 2nd and 5th edition. To fill them out I got a 2nd boxed set, an ogre, the forgeworld booster kit and Karla Von Kill.
Part of the reason I chose humans was that much of the work had been done already. Whilst working through painting up all the crp stars I’d completed Griff, Zug and Helmut using a colour scheme that I really liked. The was deep red for armour with white edges, grey clothing, silver metals and gold for decorative parts.
Normally stars are an optional extra, but I was in the mood for painting more detailed models and decided to do a couple more before starting on the normal players. Forgeworld’s output has been very hit and miss in regards to star players. Some I really dislike such as Grim, whilst others look great like Glart. Karla is one of the better stars, limb proportions looked a bit odd, but I really liked the detail on her hair and armour.
She was painted in the same way as Griff, Zug and Helmut, I’m really pleased with how her skin and the gold decoration turned out.
I’d already painted up a version of Puggy for a halfing team I did a while back, but as I had the 2nd edition and I really like the model, decided to do him again. He was really quick to do being such a small model and had very little decoration which saved more time not having to use the much of the time consuming mixed NMM technique.
The plastic kit will provide 3 linemen, a catcher, thrower and blitzer for the normal team. Whilst the forgeworld booster will add 2 blitzers, a thrower and catcher, with the plastic ogre bringing this up to 11. I wanted a full team of 16 humans plus the ogre, which meant converting; 3 linemen, 2 catchers and a blitzer.
The linemen were converted my mixing the torsos and legs between each other, and some simple arm swaps with a spare blitzer. A couple of open hands were taken from dwarfs as well.
For the catchers I mixed in parts from the throwers as they also had light armour, on top of that hands from a beastman were used on one of them.
I always like to have a team captain, with blitzers usually fulfilling that role. Whilst looking through the other plastic kits for spare parts I noticed that the arms of the dwarfs were of a very similar scale to those of the humans, when normally they have much bigger hands. The runner had an arm holding that ball that would make for a very cool conversion. There were already 5 models holding a ball (3 catchers and 2 throwers), which was a bit much. Instead he was modelled to be holding his helmet and a head from the greatswords used.
I’ve also got a 2nd edition cheerleader and Frank N Stein to paint up if I have time. If they are done the team will contain pretty much everything bar Morg, markers and staff.
The aim is to get the team fully undercoated and ready by the end of Jan and then all the painting done by end of March. This leaves April for the display base and any extra stuff I feel like doing.