The Way of the Warrior

These are basically test pieces to see if I enjoy working on them; they are far, faaaaar outside my comfort zone and area of expertise. On the other hand, they can currently be picked up from Warlord for £4 for a sprue of 5.

So here are my first two samurai. As you can see, the sprue is packed with options and there is a lot of poseability in the way you can put the figures together.
I knocked up two to have a play with the possibilites:

And then I painted them. I tried one with a very limited palette and two with the slightly more colourful approach common in the Shogunate:

Overall I'm relatively happy but the details are quite shallow; this will require a slightly more careful approach to brushwork and less reliance on washes and glazes. I can definitely see myself building a small warband although I'll have to spend a bit more time on the next ones.

Random Roundup

This is more a log entry than anything specific. First, loot.

It was my birthday last week and I received the following:

The Bolt Action ww2 starter set - because who doesn't need a new era and project? Also a walking cyberman you can shoot. I have asneaking suspicion my sons picked this more for themselves than me. 

Morgul Knights and Riders of Rohan. This came with a catalogue:

Which rapidly became the Eldest's favourite book. Seriously, he's spent hours looking through it and I have to make up bedtime stories for him from it. 

This led him to want to play more with my miniatures:

And to him building his very first model:

This led to him wanting to watch The Hobbit movies. Unsurprisingly he liked the Orcs. The only thing that scared him was Gollum during the Riddles in the Dark bit, but luckily there is always a cushion for protection....

We also had a game night: 

You can see here how competitive we got when playing City of Horror because everyone took photos of the referecne sheets on their phones and were pouring over them. 

As always, the zombie apocalypse fun of City of Horror led to total carnage and lots of backbiting. 

Next up, back to some painting. 

The Boys to Entertain You

"Meet the gang ’cause the boys are here —

The boys to entertain you."

"You is not Bloodbowl Players, you is a bunch of--" with these famous last words, Odin Ragnarsson, Coach of the Valhalla Vikings left coaching, and indeed, this plane of existence. The somewhat exuberant style of the Hochland Harlequins has often led their opponents to suspect a certain... elvishness in the boys, a reputation which their fans have picked up on in adopting the theme song to the Cabal Vision Situation Comedy It Don't Alf Itch, Nurgle as their anthem. 

 The main issue with the human team from the new Bloodbowl is the same as the Orcs; the minatures are excellent but you end up with two sets of sex; that is, every miniature is duplicated once. So the first job this time was to do some chopping and changing to make each one unique:

As you'll see later the figure on the right here had a new shoulderpad sculpted from GS. This was ti improve the pose and also help hide the join a little. But I forgot to take a picture so you'll just have to accept my word for it. 

This time the donor kit was some old Catachan Imperial Guard I had kicking around. I wanted to use some Gripping Beast Vikings but they were a touch too small and Catachans were so screamingly butch I knew they'd look good with the colour scheme I had in mind. 

As with the Orcs I wanted to use a rugby team name and settled on the Harlequins; this meant going with a Harlequino colour scheme which, broadly speaking in historical terms, was cream with multi-coloured diamonds. 

The base coat as airbrushed; a cork brown base, then beige for the main colour and finally a 2:1 beige:bone zenithal highlight.

I then did a test figure so I could work out how to place the colours on the plates and do the freehand diamond check on the shoulder pad. This was all done with inks and vallejo transparent paints over the pre-shaded basecoat. Basically, all I was doing was colouring the base. From a technical point of view it required a steady brush but was actually very fast.

Imagine my horror when someone told me you can buy harlequin transfers for Eldar from GW. 

 

So It was pretty quick to copy the scheme across the whole team. I left the shoes and helmets so I could colour code for positions. 

 

And here they are with the colour codes applied,

Standard Bloodbowl basing; 2mm static grass and foundation white for the markings. Blood was the now traditional transparent red and gloss black. 

Here's the final team shots in daylight so you can glory in the full kitsch value of the strip:

The team comprises of 4 Blitzers:

2 catchers and 1 Thrower

And a whole bunch of linesmen. 

I also knocked off the templates

The view from the back is not quite so bright, but it does show off the airbrushed shading. 

This now means that Bloodbowl 2016 is completed. 

Very happy with this and looking forward to the first match with the new kit. 

The Wolf's Hour

I finally finished off the last of the wargs and orcs for my Eldest son. After watching some of the Hobbit he asked for 'the boss' to be white - Azog obviously had a big impact on him.

Unfortunately I seem to have got the wrong end of the stick - he pointed out that the Orc wasn't white. "But that's OK, Daddy" he said, magnanimously.

He's already asked for some more.

While I was on, I also finished Bilbo. This was a cast iron sod to paint being almost closer to 15mm than 28mm. Great likeness but not exactly fun!

The Wasp Factory

"Some say, Jim, that the defensive line of the Wissenland Wasps ate the entire line of scrimmage of the Shire Sasuagemakers during the 2467 Chaos Cup Playoffs; no-one knows for sure because Cabalvision deemed the footage too disturbing to broadcast."

"All we know for sure is that their offensive line, the Blitzers, all wear the 'red splash' an item of red clothing to show they successfully fouled an opposing player without getting sent off. Not for nothing, Bob, are these lads known as the Codpiece Crushers of the Chaos Cup."

I've painted up my first team from the new 2016 Bloodbowl game.

The main issue was turning two sets of 6 miniatures into 12 individual pieces. This was done with a few head swaps, some repositioning of arms and, in the case of the Thrower to Blitzer, some plasticard armour and some astonishingly 1970s footballer sideburns.

As an aside, I love that teams come with personalised markers and balls. In the case of the orcs, two inflated squig skins:

So that's a very productive start to 2017. Here's hoping I can keep it up! 

Next up is some more Middle Earth for my son and then the Human team before the start of yet another project...

Happy new Year everyone and thanks as always for helping keep up my mojo.