With the NAF team pretty much done and a bit more time on my hands I’ve been working on my own projects. Along with new teams, GW have also been adding lots of cool and interesting stars in each Spike magazine. Some of these stars have had a model released through Forgeworld, but it has been slow going and I suspect many will never get a model. This has given me reason to convert them myself, usually starting with Blood Bowl plastics and adding parts from other models or sculpting them myself.

Luckily whilst some people were panic buying worthless things like food and toilet paper I had the foresight to plan ahead. Over the decades I’ve built up a huge stock of the actual essentials, my bitz box is very well stocked as I regularly buy kits I think would have potential for Blood Bowl.



Crazy Igor

The first model was the last of the crp era stars I had to do. It looks like Igor won’t make it into the new rules, but once I have done him and a vampire team I’ll have painted every crp player and star.

He’s made from a Blood Bowl ghoul, Underworlds Grymwatch and Garreks’ Reaver and shoulder pads from the Warcry Spire Tyrants. He’s supposed to have been a chaos warrior, so I tried to keep that and make him look dangerous but also someone who had regularly been feasted on by vampires. I’ll paint him with very pale skin and add plenty of old and fresh bite marks.





Bob Bifford

I really liked the new ogre kit and was wanting to find a use for them. Bob’s adventures are always a fun part of the Spikes and his illustration pretty closely matched the new ogre models. I had thought to do multiple hat and hair styles like in Spike, but thought it would be hard to get them to fit even if magnetised.

I settled on just using the illustration from his player profile as the basis. He was made from a normal ogre with head from an Ogryn, shoulder pads from orcs and the mohawk is from a dire avenger. The rest of the detail has been added using greenstuff.

When I tweeted out this pic someone asked if this was for the NAF human team, and he can play for them so this might be an idea. I’d much rather the models I paint go to someone who will use them rather than sitting on my shelves. He’ll probably be painted in the colours from the illustration rather than in team colours and I might add Morg to them as well.





Dribl and Drull

I already had some skink parts from when I had done a lizardman team for the NAF, but most of these were not good matches for the twin skinks. I did see the Star Priest as having a lot of potential, his crest was close to theirs and he had a lot of feathers on him which were ideal.

Dribl used the torso and feathers from the priest. The hardest part was getting his pose right, no matter how I tried I couldn’t match the illustration without it looking unnatural. In the end I settled for it looking like he was leaping up about to land on someone by repositioning his legs and filling gaps with greenstuff. His tail is actually from a horror, those are really useful model for a surprising number of Blood Bowl conversions. Not only do they provide useful parts for tentacles, but you also have arms and legs that will fit other models. I used a normal skink head, but did sand the crest to into spikes like in the drawing for him.




Drull was a bit simpler as his pose and I could use a normal BB skink with little changes. His head came from the star priest with a face guard and feathers added to it. His arms were from normal skinks and his necklace came from the star priest’s wrist. The hardest part was finding a cloak to fit and in the end that came from a wulfen with lots of greenstuff to replace the wolf’s head. His dagger also proved tricky and in the end I settled with one from a dark elf corsair.





Bryce 'The Slice' Cambuel

He is clearly based on Bruce Campbell’s character Ash from the Evil dead movies and Tv show. His legs came from a wight as I wanted them to be a bit bulkier, whilst the torso was a normal skeleton, though the shoulder pads were hacked up to look like the drawing. His head is a normal AoS skeleton, but the fire came from horrors or was sculpted from greesntuff.

The hardest part was getting the chainsaw right. I had wanted to match the pose, but also give him a chainsaw hand like Ash has. I just couldn’t get this to look right when adding the bone ribcage and handle. In the end I went for him holding the saw ready to cut as this looked better and still captured the essence of the star. The saw was made from a 40K berserker chainsword and skellie bits.




G'Ral Blodschüker

I had already made J Earlice from the crp rules and could have just used him since he’s pretty similar. However when the Abhorrant Archregent came out I really liked the model and wanted to use him. He is strikingly close to G’ral and the main task was repositioning his legs to be in a running pose. This was proving quite a challenge since he has an extra leg joint compared to normal humans. The horrors came to my rescue again and I was able to take feet from them that both looked good and gave a stable base.

The rest of the task was adding greesntuff detail, I’d cast a should pad to use for him. In the end it wasn’t a good fit and so I had to sand it back and reshape it, it might have been simpler to just built it from scratch.

The part I am not happy with is his hand spikes. These came from skaven blitzers with an extra middle spike from a spear. I tried to carve them to match the drawing, but he’s looking more like a Wolverine cosplayer now. I may change these again or get rid of them entirely.