Wednesday 10 December 2014

GW miniatures Blood Bowl

After painting up some Space Marines using, not exactly a speed-painting technique, but a faster-than-normal approach, and taking a break from writing mountains of trigonometry-based functions for line-of-sight and bullet-ricochet routines, we decided to have a go at some more GW miniatures - only this time, Blood Bowl players.

We used pretty much the same technique as for the Space Marines. Firstly, whack on a couple of base colours, keeping the palette simple. We're using Ash grey for anything that's going to be white at the end, A funny orangey-yellow for anything that will eventually be yellow, and some Crystal Blue (the same colour we used to base-coat the Space Marines) for anything blue.


At this stage, the miniatures look awful. They look pretty much like the first time I tried painting a miniature, aged about 12 years old! A quick dash of Army Painter Quickshade and the miniature is transformed


This time, because we're using mostly "warm" colours, and because we're expecting problems with painting yellow over a darker colour, we went with Strong (rather than Dark) Tone.
As with the Space Marines, the Quickshade not only picks out the shaded area but darkens the underlying colours.

After a good 36 hours drying time, a coat of Testors Dullcote kills the shine - and dulls down the "vibrancy" of the colours. The minis are looking ok at this point, but a bit dull and "dirty".


(this photo was taken after a little tidying up of the yellow. Yellow is a notoriously difficult colour to paint over miniatures. We really should have stuck with a  blue-and-grey team, as both colours offer great coverage, even over darker base paints).


This team is going to be based on the "Bright Crusaders" from the very first Blood Bowl game I ever played. The Blood Bowl game came  with a lot of "fluff" in the 80s. Example teams were given, and I just thought that painting this team as the Bright Crusaders might re-capture some of the initial excitement of seeing and playing the game, all those years ago.

Just like the Space Marines, the colours were "tidied up" by painting over the shaded colours, only this time, we went one shade brighter than the base coat. So instead of orangey-yellow, we used Sunshine Yellow (this takes two or three coats to get decent coverage). Instead of Crystal Blue, we painted the gloves and kneepads in Electric Blue. Instead of painting the white parts a pale grey and edge-highlighting in white, we just went for white from the off. This means no edge highlighting on the white parts - making the painting process a little quicker, but the finished result a little less interesting!

Finally, each miniature was finished off using our new-favourite-method for basing: a tiny dab of superglue on each foot, and glued to a clear acrylic disc!



After painting the shoulder pad and legs white, and tidying up the feet just a little (though not too much, to try to keep the appearance of muddy-white Nike trainers) we decided to keep the shirt grey instead of making that white also. This is going to be the basis for our team colours for all the other miniatures - for this team at least!

Unlike the Space Marines, which were plastic miniatures, we've glued a metal miniature to an acrylic disc. To make the bond we used Loctite Superglue (the real stuff, not the cheap 5-for-a-quid stuff from Poundland).

Putting superglue onto clear acrylic is a risky job. Superglue makes clear acrylic go cloudy, so it's really important that there's no excess squeezing out from under the feet. Obviously, we made sure that we used only a tiny drop of glue on each of the feet of the miniature. But, to discourage the glue from squelching out from under the feet, we held the miniature upside-down and let the disc rest on the feet of the miniature. This made sure that there was no real weight on the join, allowing it to go off without pushing any excess out of the sides.

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