Of all the teams in BB16, Wood Elves had the widest variety of stars. They weren’t all that well served with existing models, which made some of the conversions pretty challenging.


Curnoth Darkwold

The illustration only showed about half the model, which had left me to make up what I thought those parts should look like. I liked the colour scheme of Gloriel and quite a few stars in other Spikes all had similar schemes, so I used that one.

Most of the model is bare skin and I’ve had a lot of practice at painting that and got pretty good at it. I made his skin a little darker than normal elves as he’s outside all the time and not a huge fan of bathing.

With wood elves having lots of brown and greens I often had to decide whether to go with warm or cold versions of those colours to avoid them looking too samey. His loin cloth, boots and hair were painted in cold versions, whilst his leggings, horns, face mask and leaves were warmer.

I wanted the bones to look old and those were shaded with grey rather than brown. The white highlights on his legs were to add some brighter patches, finally the blue tattoos were there for an added splash of a different colour.




Gloriel Summerbloom

I was fortunate enough to have the full illustration to use as inspiration as well as the Forgeworld model (which came out after I made my own conversion). I liked the scheme, so it was just a case of how much of the detail I had the time and skill to add.

Turning a very detailed 2D drawing into a 3D model is tough and I’d already skipped some details in the conversion. The important thing to get right was her luxurious long blonde hair and so I spent a long time on that.

I’d had to miss out the heart on her loin cloth as it was too difficult to convert and there wasn’t the access needed to paint it on. Instead I focused on getting the other decoration like the gold border and white/green lines right.

Only her face was exposed, but she got much paler skin than Curnoth to make her appear more delicate. I was most proud of adding the leaf pattern on her bodysuit as it was hard to paint this accurately and get it to stand out with light brown on mid brown. The part that turned out worst was the football, even after redoing it I was unable to get it how I wanted.

I did want to reflect the way the illustration had lots of flowers and plants on her, so bought some grass and flower tufts from my local hobby shop. It might have been better to get just yellow and white flowers online as those would have fitted her scheme, but this added a bit more colour. Plus I was impatient to get her completed.





Swiftvine Glimmershard

This was another model which had the full illustration on view. The challenge with her was that the drawing had lots of pale colours, which made it hard to paint without these blending into each other, in particular hair and skin. I had to exaggerate them somewhat as on a small model you often need bolder colours compared to a full page drawing.

The highlights on her bodysuit ended up being pretty extreme as earlier attempts were becoming more of a blob.

Her hair also needed to be repainted a few times to emphasise the highlights and avoid the highlights looking to similar to the highlights in her skin. The wings took by far the longest time as they are almost ethereal, I only did the spiral on one side as it was such a hassle and mirrored it on the other wing. In hindsight this might have been her player number as 6 rather than a spiral. Trying to paint a the pattern on the pale wood armour was a challenge to get it to look like wood and met with limited success. Those holes I’d made in the shoulder pad were a real hassle to shade.

The dark red roses and yellow decoration of her body added some more variety in the colours and got away from pastel shades.





Maple Highgrove

Maple has by far the most boring colour scheme of all the models here, consisting of brown and green.

I added a little variety into the colours by using a warmer brown for his shoulder pads, but aside from that most of the painting was of just the 2 colours. This was going to look very dull and to brighten things up a bit I painted his eyes and the runes with a glowing green effect.

Since the model was a bit boring I again added flower and grass tufts, focusing more behind him as if these parts are growing quickly to help entangle opposing players.





Zolcacth the Zoat

Thankfully Forgeworld released a really nice Zolcath model and I didn’t have to convert my own.

His colour scheme seemed pretty standard with dark green scales, green flesh and a pale underbelly with red armour.

This ended up being the most time consuming model to paint, his chest alone took several days, but I was very happy with that part. Sadly I could not quite get his face right and feel that is the weakest part of the model.

The skulls were again shaded with grey to represent old bones and stand out from his chest, which was highlighted with bone. I was pleased with how the armour turned out, in particular the gold edging. I have been having some success mixing browns and yellows with gold paint to get more interesting shading. This time I did each armour piece in turn and had all the key shades already mixed. That seemed to work much better than doing 1 colour at a time over the whole model.





With these guys done I am just 6 models away from completing the 80 BB16 stars. Need to get a move on as GW have just added 3 new stars to BB20 and there’s a few there I have to do. Plus the NAFC happened last weekend and the team I painted was finally given away, so I need to start painting teams again after a couple of years off.