Gobbler Grimlich

The hardest thing to get right for him was the skin of his underbelly. I wanted to use similar colouring to a toad with dark green for most of his skin and lighter for his chest, throat and inner parts of his arms and legs. However the pale green was very close to the cream colour of his shirt. Luckily the black border went someway to helping to differentiate between the two.

The illustration already showed most of his colour scheme, I kept to the red armour with silver edges and white clothing.





Glart Smashrip

Forgeworld had done an excellent sculpt of him, which saved me having to do a conversion.

I didn’t want to use their colour scheme and instead used the same scheme as the Skaven team I did for the NAF GT. Orange armour with silver edging, brown clothing and white decoration. This is loosely based on the Cleveland Browns and a scheme I really like. I was again experimenting with the scuffed leather look for his loin cloth, using a warm brown as the basis for the highlights. On reflection I think he should have had more white edging to his armour on top of the shoulder pad, maybe replacing that of the connecting straps.

The most frustrating part of the model was that the warpstone ball turned out really well, much better than Guffle. I’d decided not to do directional lighting this time as the ball was really a base decoration and I am not a fan of every star holding a ball, especially if they are more of a bashy player.




Lucien and Valen Swift

More Forgeworld models, this time I had made changes to Valen as I wanted him to look like a thrower, actually adding a ball. I also wanted to change the colour scheme rather than just copy Forgeworld or the illustration.

I had really liked mixing a dark blue bodysuit with pale blue armour on Bo, I also gave them bare arms to switch things up. Unfortunately the decoration on the armour made it difficult to give them silver chestplates like him. I went a little too pale with the bodysuit highlights and found it difficult to make the blue armour pale enough without it getting too close to the white loin cloth and sashes. If I were to do a team using this scheme I’d stop highlights sooner for the body and start with a lighter basecoat on the armour.

The gems were painted red and the kneepads and shoulder pads gold to add some warmer colouring to the models.






Asperon Thorn

He was one of the first stars I converted and thus was a lot less detailed than the later ones. Back then I was trying more to capture the spirit of the star. As he was a dark elf thrower I used parts of the pro elf thrower and some shoulder pads in the rough shape of the illustration. For newer conversions I made more effort to match the drawings, even making my own shoulder pads.

With the Nurgle stars I’d tried batch painting, but it hadn’t really saved much time since they all had different coloured skin and armour. The dark elves were a lot closer, with most of them having the same scheme as the boxed set dark elves. This did pose some difficulties as they had dark purple armour, dark green cold one hides, black bodysuits and brown straps/boots, with only silver and their flesh being the lighter parts. The near identical schemes of the illustrations did make it much quicker to paint, expect to see more dark elf stars in my next blog.

I did give Asperon a white sash to brighten him up, but he still ended up turning out a little drab. This is how the illustration looks, but I do wonder if I should have added some gold edging or white decoration. For me stars should always obviously stand out from the other players on the pitch. In many cases they are unique players that don’t have an equivalent like Gobbler, have some characteristic which makes them stand out like Glart or have more decorative armour such as the Swift twins.