The Challenge: Painting the first Dwarf (+video)

I have finished the first model for the dwarf team. He will be a dwarf runner used to handle the ball, hence the orc head held like a football. The limited colour set is reflected in it’s colour scheme. I had to mix the brown from red and green, using a little more red to get the deeper brown. I am no expert painter but I think the result’s are good enough for a game of Blood Bowl.

The Challenge: A new set of paints

So after the cheap acrylic disaster I needed to find a set of paints. Getting a starter set of paints is not really an option as the starter Games Workshop set comes in a budget breaking £18.00. So the idea is to see if we can come up with a scheme to use minimum colour’s. As we can mix and dilute the paint to get different colour’s and washers. I decided to settle on 4 colour’s to try and reach the goal. Black, white, green, red and yellow. Yellow gives me a better colour to lighten the red and green than just using white. Shading with just black and white can sometimes lead to grey looking tones.

Now I just needed to decide one who’s paints to use. My own collection is a mix of Games Workshop and Vallejo paints. GW’s paint’s are great and the washer’s are my favourite paints to use. But GW paints cost £2.25 a pot, so would cost me £11.25. Vallejo also do excellent paints and have the advantage of coming out at only £1.70 a pot which means a total of £8.50. They also come in handy bottle form which let’s you use droplets of your paint on the palette.

Another alternative is enamel paints from Humbrol or Revell and come out at an even better price of £1.12. But they take a while to dry and you have to use white spirit to wash your brushes. As a test though I think I’ll try to paint a model using the enamels (a friend has kindly let me use his set to paint) just to see how they compare.

Dwarf Team

Here is another team I painted for a friend. He wanted Polish flag colours and 1 of the dwarfs has the emblem on his helmet. Not sure where the actually miniatures are from.

The Challenge: Not all acrylics are created equal.

In an effort to keep costs down, I thought I would see how just a normal set of acrylics came out. The set of 12 was £3, with the 3 brushes at £1.50 the painting material’s came out at £4.50. This would leave me £17.50 for my second team and game material’s, which seems achievable.

I picked my Dwarf runner mounted him on a paint pot and applied the white undercoat. The paint did not cover the miniature very well. It was thin, gloopy and provided a very uneven surface. Keeping my chin up I applied another coat and then the main base colour’s. The end result was horrible. The paint had a weird shine to it and the whole process of painting (which I usually love) was awkward. The brick that crushed the camels back was when I tried to apply a wash made from the acrylic. This can usually cover your dodgy paint job but only made it a million times worse.

So off to a jar of Dettol and water to strip the plastic miniature. If you want to see a guide to using Dettol to strip you miniatures a good article can be found here.

So I’ll have to re-buy my paints and try a different avenue. Does this mean the challenge is over? The answers is no, I plan to cost only the things that contribute to making the Blood Bowl set. Therefore this experiment will have to go into the lessons learnt pile.

Human Team

Here is my second team I painted for friend the humans from the Blood Bowl box game. It is a simple colour scheme but still one of my favourites. The full set is here.

The Challenge: Dwarfs Assembled

So the team is assembled and consists of 12 players (though 2 maybe temporary depending how the challenge goes).

We have 2 Dwarf runners sporting Orc heads as balls.

The Blitzers will be the ones with cloaks and Blockers the ones without shields and the two with shields but no cloaks.

The full set of pictures can be found here. One of them is now sporting a scar as I slipped with the Stanley knife, typical Dwarfs always getting themselves into scrapes.

The Challenge: First Purchase Dwarf pack of 10

As the Dwarf’s came out the cheapest I have bought the pack of Dwarf Ironclad troops from Mantic. They come in a plastic box. At first I thought this was a waste till I realised they are meant to be a carrying case to hold the set.

This is a neat idea and sets the tone as the box isn’t just a little set of dwarfs but a few well thought out extras.

You get two identical sprues which hold 5 dwarfs. You also get on each sprue an Orc head, tankard, bull dog model, dead dwarf and a few extra arms and dwarf heads.Maybe the dead/drunk Dwarf could be used a team members saving the £4. I may leave the Slayer model to the side to see if we have the money towards the end of the challenge. The other pieces like the bull dog models could be used as themed turn and re-roll counters. Even the spare Dwarf heads could be used as the ball.

About 6 of the model’s come with the shield as a separate piece which is good for a Blood Bowl team. One of the arms on these miniature's are also separate so you can put them in different poses.

The over 4 figures come with their shield attached to the extent I not could separate without destroying the piece. Two of these figures also have their axes attached, but these shouldn't be to much trouble to remove. It is a shame. But then again these are not fantasy football miniatures and we are only using them to keep costs down. Saying that I think the set should look good and I am pleased with the extras. The bulldog’s might also give me the theme for the Dwarf team, I may try and find a bull dog symbol to place on the shields. Here is a link to all of the pictures taken.

The Challenge: Undead Team

As I said in the last blog entry the other team is Undead or Khemri. Though the Khemri team is more of a dry skeleton's and mummy’s, I could get away with just changing the paint work to sandy colours rather than wet rotten reds and purples.

This set of ghoul’s could be modified to make the main set of your team.

Or if you wanted to have skeletons this set could fill in for them again at £8.

Games workshop also do a cheap set of skeletons for £5.Or if we wanted to spend a little more we can get this troop of 10 for £15.

If we had spare money in the budget I would definitely go for these mummies from Willy Miniatures.

So at a push this team at it’s cheapest would be £13.

The Challenge: Dwarf Team

The first team I put together is going to be the cheapest I can get it and cost will dictate the team selection. I have two ideas a dwarf and an undead or Khemri teams. An issue to putting a team together is the variation of model and player. So an Orc team made up of goblins, troll and different positional Orc players might be to many model variations to do cheaply.

Possible Dwarf team

Due to them consisting of the same race and don’t all dwarf’s look the same anyway I have found my first possible team.

I am hoping I can modify this set of Dwarf’s enough to create Blockers, Runners and Blitzers.
As no Dwarf team would be without a troll slayer, I am thinking the following model could be modified to be my slayer.
The miniatures for Mantic would come in at a cost of £12. £8 for the dwarfs and £4 for the Berserker. Looking through their miniatures I could source both teams from them, but I also want to look at other miniature manufacturers.