With all the stars from Chaos Chosen, Dark Elves and Nurgle completed, it was time to look at the Undead. They had quite a diverse cast, lots of crp stars had gone through a revamp in BB16 and some new ones added. As an added advantage this also covered the remaining options for Necromantic, Khemri and Vampires.



G’ral Blodschüker

I’d already converted and painted the crp ghoul star, but G’ral was slightly different in stats and the model I used as a basis for him is really nice.

In the illustration he is very grey, which is fitting for an undead player, also makes for a rather dull model, especially a star player. To avoid this I did tweak some of the colours. Normally I prefer grey shading for bones, but went with brown this time. Also his loin cloth was painted a light warm brown in place of a greyer tone which would have been more fitting. These changes along with the fire pattern on his shoulder pad did help brighten him up, if leaving a slightly disjointed colour scheme.




Throttlesnot ‘The Impaler’

There wasn’t a lot to go on his colour scheme, just a bit of his shirt and the shoulder pads. These were also quite grey looking, so instead I made his shirt a dirty white and the armour pieces black. His trousers were painted mid-brown with any belts and straps a darker brown.

As he’s a zombie a little grey was added to the skin, but it was kept mostly green to avoid looking too dull.

The most time consuming part was painting all chequered patterns on his armour as theses had to not only be roughly square (undead and goblins are not the neatest) but also have some shading and highlights.




Bryce ‘The Slice’ Cambuel

I’d based this model on the BB16 illustration, which had a lot less fire on it. Probably a good thing as fire is a pain to both model and paint right. His armour was also a lot darker in the older drawing, but I preferred that shade anyway.

The green flames along with bone and black armour already made a pretty good scheme. I gave him a red loin cloth for added colour as well.

The lines on his armour did not turn out quite how I’d hoped, they were meant to look chipped and battered, but ended up being a bit messy. I’d probably have been better starting with a much lighter base colour and only added minimal highlights.

His saw blade was tough to get right as well, trying to make it look rusty without it becoming a brownish blob.

I was happy with the flames, they are an odd thing to paint since the dark colours go on the edges, plus it was green rather than yellow fire. Some origin source lighting was added to his skull, saw and shoulder pads. Just a small amount as it’s something which if done wrong can make the model look worse, doubly so if from the wrong angle.




Ivan ‘The Animal’ Deathshroud

I was able to find a full drawing of him online, which was a big help with the painting. He comes with a very cool red, black and silver scheme with white details that was fun to paint.

I’d learnt from Bryce and the white marking on his armour did turn out much better, with cleaner lines. His blades were tricky to paint as it was hard to tell what colour they should be, in the end I went with slightly rusty and chipped silver.

Horns are usually something I do well, but his didn’t turn out that great, it was had to get at them and the shading made them look bland. I had been tempted to give him glowing eyes, but there was so little skull to work with and it was empty sockets which was a further complication.




Gretchen Wächter ‘The Blood Bowl Widow’

She was one of the first stars I converted and quite different from the Forgeworld model. I wanted to keep her closer to the illustration than their scheme as was never really a fan of the black armour with flames look.

To try and make her more ghostly I used various shades of grey, like in the illustration. The idea wasn’t just to look like a black and white photo, and so in many cases other colours were missed in with the grey.

This is most obvious on her flesh, but the armour straps had brown mixed with grey as well.

As she had eyeballs I did give her glowing green eyes, so again look more ghostly.

Painting large white hair like hers and Mordrix is really time consuming, hopefully it will be a while before I have to do that again.




Skrull Halfheight

I was very pleased when he came out from Forgeworld as he’d be very difficult to paint. The scheme they’d used was close to the illustration, which meant it was easy to copy. The biggest change was to the severed arm, which for some reason had orange skin in their version. I changed this to grey and painted the clothing yellow and green, since it looks like it used to belong to a wood elf.

The gold on his armour turned out really well, I’d mixed dark brown in with it for shading and then added yellow and white for the highlights. This made it look old, but still decent quality since it is dwarf made and gold is well known for tarnishing less than other metals.

His beard was shaded with a warmer grey, just to change things up a little and I liked how that looked with the flaming armour.




With these stars done I not have 15 of the 80 from BB16 to go. GW do keep releasing new teams along with new versions of the BB16 stars. Some of them have been outstanding and I am very tempted to get their Barak for instance.