The recent re-release of Blood Bowl had me digging through my big pile o’ boxes to find my antique copy of this classic game and convince myself that I really didn’t need to succumb to new shiny syndrome and buy a copy of the new version!
I have the old school plastic human and orc teams (badly) painted so I was able to crack them out and have a couple of games with my wife. It was great fun but it occurred to me that it would potentially be even more fun to introduce some star players. More digging ensued and I discovered my 22 year old Griff Oberwald. Apparently at some point in the past I had painted him black and red and then decided to strip this off because he was in a very sad state! Clearly I couldn’t let this legend of the Blood Bowl field languish like this so I decided to bring him out of retirement.
Painting this miniature reminded me just how lucky we are these days – the cast was definitely a lot rougher than my rose tinted spectacles had led me to believe! Consequently I wanted to strike a balance and make him look decent without spending too long over something that’s never going to be perfect. Total time here was about 15 hours which I think is fairly reasonable considering there’s a bit of freehand work.
I used this opportunity to test the scale 75 flesh paint set that I acquired a while ago. My overall impression was favourable although I think it would be good to try these paints out on a larger area of flesh. I knew that they needed a lot of shaking before I bought the set but I did find this aspect of using them very tedious, and it definitely slowed me down a bit! Nice range of colours though.
I also shaded the gold using the gloss version of reikland fleshshade. I like the way that it doesn’t dull the metallic paint but I found that it lacked a bit of contrast so I still ended up revisiting most of the recesses with paint. It’s useful, but definitely not a magic bullet.
Hopefully Griff will be taking to the field soon, although my wife will probably use him so I may end up regretting this little project!
Gareth Nicholas Blog 