Pitchin' #1

 Imperial "Nobility"

    Blood bowl has always fascinated me, but due to my poor hobbying skills and lack of local friends interested in playing the game, I sat on my interest for the game for many years. I dabbled in DungeonBowl and Kerrunch! (a very cool kids version released back in the 90's) and my cousin and I played a game or two of the 2016 version. I really enjoyed Blood Bowl 2 on steam and still think it's one of the best ported iterations of the tabletop. I followed the formative blog Big Boss Redskullz where Tommy crafted, among other amazing creations, wonderful blood bowl teams that had my inspiration running high. Another amazing source of inspiration was the, now defunct, Senshinchamber DungeonBowl blog. (It is, however, available through the Wayback Machine)

    

But my Blood Bowl drought continued. Mostly due to having no one to play with.

    

It's still the case but I do what I want. (Though I may have convinced my wife to play due to the release of the Gnome team. She's a sucker for geese and whimsical forest creatures)

So, trudging forwards I cracked open my 2020 Season 2 boxset and got to work hacking and clawing my way to a team that I felt good about. Bashing up and painting the Imperial Nobility team.

  The Bashes

    I am increasingly annoyed at the greebles and detail overload crammed into every GW model. I think it makes sense that they have to cram models with detail these days because the individual models are so barren of any defining character. You have to add stupid nurglings to a base when a model lacks any personality. So, I started hacking off feathers and extraneous bullshit from all the Imperial Nobility. I think it really uplifts the models and makes them a bit more brutal. 

    Some of the faces I covered in greenstuff to create faceplates and tried my best to replace arms, heads or hands to make the duplicate sculpts unique. I also hate nobility so I wanted to get rid of all the pomp, but thought it was important to retain the pretentiousness where I could. The thrower model is especially pretentious and I had fun changing around the hands to make this more pronounced.

    

    The linemen and women and the positionals received a random smattering of bits. I especially like the blitzer with the human helm and chaos knight arm. Using the bulbous helm from the inugural smashbash "Corpulent Horrors" kit was perfect and added to the already rotund body. I got lazy with the linewomen and just did a simple head swap using a KDM bit. 

The Paint

   I did my typical oils over a zenithal. Painting runny or solid and dabbing away at the oils until I was happy. This group of models ended up being tackled with quite a bit more solid base colors than other models I've painted, using straight oil right on the miniature. 

     I'm deep in the Viridian Game atm and have been trying to smash it onto everything that I'm painting right now. Cad red always pops and is usually an auto include for me. Sap green worked for the pitch, and I stippled on some naples yellow to try and make them not look black. Adding a white line helped keep the models rooted firmly in blood bowl and I always like trying to add it whenever I've painted a blood bowl model.

    These are quite a bit less expressive than my other paintjobs and I really struggled with that from the outset. I have a weird personal rule about not stripping models though, and I kept going with the scheme to try and bring it back in line with a more expressive paint scheme. They mostly just turned out dark... Which is fine, and I'm happy with them. Not every model can be a banger, just gotta power through sometimes and get it done. Shout out to two of my good hobby mates for listening to me complain and getting me back on the right track (You know who you are Rory and Adam)

    Speaking of expressive style miniature painting, WATCH Totally Not Panicking's brand new twitch stream! Seriously worth checking out, Matt is a fantastic technical painter with tons of fundamental knowledge about value and contrast and how to translate expressive style painting onto miniatures. If you want to learn, even if you're not interested in painting expressively, his chats about value and contrast are invaluable.

Lore    

    I haven't decided on a concrete lore for these badasses, but I have a general idea for how I want to play make believe. I recently discovered GutterBowl, an alternative "fight club" style play for Blood Bowl. Most of the teams involved are communities, neighborhoods or PUBS! The rules focus a lot more on fouling and the team starting cash is more limited than a standard blood bowl team. There are also rules for scouting, so if a player has gotten good enough there is a chance the blood bowl scouts will steal them away for the major league teams. They play on the streets and in the sewer and the first rule of gutterbowl is you don't talk about gutterbowl.

    This team will come from a local pub for the working class. Someone will make a joke about one of the patrons being a "prince" and the team will be born. All members of the team are patrons of their local pub, the Ogre is probably the bouncer. They lean into the joke of their team captain being a "prince" and don the regalia of the local barons or dukes in a cynical and mocking fashion.

That's all for now sportsfans.

cheers, and be good to eachother