Blood Bowl Human team

I've had these on the bench for way longer than is reasonable. I bought the new edition of the game when it first came out as I have great memories of playing third edition. My main memories of second edition are of painting the astrogranite pitch and hating the way it looked afterwards, and perhaps more distressingly, being given the box for my birthday and reading the rulebook in the car on the way to go ten pin bowling, my birthday treat. This lead to a nasty incident of travel sickness and throwing up in the lobby of the bowling place. But as I say, I loved third edition.

The first team to see some paint is the humans, because I really want to paint the orcs as they are my old team, and if I did them first I'd probably never paint the humans. I started painting them as soon as I opened the box, disliked the colour scheme I had chosen, and promptly stalled for two years. In fact they were the last thing I started painting before my hobby dropped off in favour of fatherhood.
Here's a quick shot of a before/after type nature.

As you can see, I was going for a rather clean look, based off a miami dolphins kit. I didn't like the bright orange, and my turquoise is rubbish, so I went a bit more lo-fi with a turquoisey-blue armour colour, and brown on all the trimmings. Glad I did, as I think it gives them a bit more of an old world, less polished feel.

I decided also to dirty them up, and make sure the blood is firmly in blood bowl. To this end I have used Tamiya clear red to bloody up the frontline troops such as the linemen, ogre, and to a lesser extent the blitzers, whilst the catchers are more muddy and beaten up, and the throwers, lingering towards backfield, are relatively clean.

The ogre is my favourite, and I started with his face, and was very pleased with it. So pleased that I didn't really want to paint the rest of him in case I screwed it up, but paint him I did, and he's come out alright.

This little distraction has reminded me how long GW models now take to paint. The scale creep has meant that you can't get away with a few brush strokes, everything takes time, needs to be looked at from every angle to avoid missing something, and is just generally a bit more tedious. I have got somewhat bored with painting in the past, and found myself having the same feeling towards the end of this project. Then I remembered I have painted an entire 1000pt British army without even a hint of the loathing I felt for batch painting these. I guess I much prefer painting proper 28mm miniatures, and painting modern GW miniatures just bores me. That said, I'm happy with the overall finished product, and fully intend to keep on painting all the new Blood Bowl teams, including the positionals when forge world gets round to releasing the damn things. Star players are no for me though. £18 for one human sized miniature is too rich for my tastes.

Hello world.

Hi everyone*, welcome to Playing Billy Suggers, a spooneristic and ocassionally foul-mouthed journey through my wargaming activities. This post is by way of a hello, and a little bit about me and my wargaming history. I shall intersperse it with pictures of what I have been working on lately; a warlord games British Army starter box, and a few other ww2 odds and ends, just to liven up the wall of text. Some of them will be a bit crap quality, like this first one, because they are snapshots from my phone. I'll try harder in future. Probably.

I have decided to ramp up my involvement in the hobby of late. For the last five years I have been languishing under the weight of a teaching job, and for the last two under the heel of a miniature tyrant (my son), and it's about bloody time I took some time and energy back to enjoy myself and get out of the house a bit. To this end, I have started to paint and build again, and I'm looking into local wargames clubs, with a view to actually going outdoors and meeting people. I've never really got the hang of doing it before, and doubt I'll be much better at this time, but I'm determined, dammit, that I shall be a quasi-hermit no longer.

I started wargaming back in about '91, having bought the Rogue Trader rulebook and a box of Space Orks. I'd been led to do so by Space Crusade, and a copy of White Dwarf bought randomly whilst on holiday on the Isle of Wight. It kept me entranced in the back of the car for the entire week and blew the mind of the ten year old who until then had been making dioramas with his airfix planes (thoroughly dunked in enamel and everything!). I played 40k religiously through until 3rd edition (and a renaissance during 5th and 6th), and WFB during the 3rd edition 'red phase'. I also played all the specialist games, and have serious soft spots for Blood Bowl, Warhammer Quest, and Necromunda to this day. I have zero interest in Age of Sigmar or the current iteration of 40k. I can't stand the scale creep, and don't think GW's current approach to miniatures lends itself to mass armies of the type I like to collect. I do still occasionally play 40k, but it is with select friends who I played with back when I was a neophyte, and only because I own an entire Ultramarine 4th company, and it would be a crime to spend that much money on something and have to keep it in a box in the loft.

I went to Salute about 8 years ago for the first time, and lo! the veil was lifted from mine eyes and I beheld the glory of the vast range of other games out there. I'm still flitting between systems, but have finally realised that you collect a period, not a rule set. To that end I am currently reviving my interest with WW2 miniatures (mainly Warlord at the moment, but I plan to branch out at some point). I also have several small dark ages warbands used mainly for SAGA but ripe for expansion if I desire, and a Crusader army, ostensibly built for a War & Conquest refight of Arsuff that I had in mind, but currently languishing as a half finished project. Most of my stuff is 28mm, because that is what I enjoy painting, but I'd very much like to try a smaller scale with either ancients or napoleonics.

That's it, really. I look forward to yelling into this void again. I'll leave you with a couple of tanks, because everyone loves tanks, right?

*Or no-one, as the case may be. I have very few expectations that this blog will get read at all, but I'm going to do it anyway. Call it my folly.