It’s hobby update time! I just realized I hadn’t shared anything about what I’m working on for our June Turn It Up to 11 miniatures painting challenge. Eleven miniatures that need to be painted … that coincidentally aligns with the starting roster for a Blood Bowl team. And it just so happens I’m starting up a new team for our league’s summer season. Some guys in the league were talking about playing goblins and vampires, so I decided to step off the beaten path and go for something a little different for me. Underworld denizens!

I bought some of the GW plastic goblins, got some skaven off my buddy Tim and traded Jeff some genestealer cultists for the fellwater trogoth bits to make an underworld troll. I decided to build four goblins straight out of the box with no mutations in order to get painting sooner, but don’t worry the mutations will come. That’s part of the fun of playing underworld, all those tasty, tasty mutations.

However, I did want to distinguish the two skaven blitzers and the two skaven throwers as they are identical sculpts. I decided to give one of the skaven a claw so he can hopefully develop into a killer on the field to help even the numbers on the pitch, because you just know with AV7 across the team I’m going to suffer some casualties.

Extra arms is always a good idea for a ball carrier so I clipped the arm off an extra lineman I had and removed the ball from the tail and placed it in the extra hand. Trimming the entwined tail off the ball was trickier than I thought and so was trying to repair the ball with green stuff. In the end, I figured a warpstone ball made by some ratmen and goblins would probably look pretty janky anyway.

The bits Jeff sent me included a couple different head and arm options along with some Age of Sigmar orruk bits for pads and gear. I settled on a pose I feel conveys a little energy into the model, like he’s either roaring in celebration of a touchdown or about to bring his fist down on some unfortunate victim. He’s got a rather vicious looking punch dagger on his left fist and some jawbone bits as a sort of face guard to protect that pretty face of his.

Last Friday was warm and sunny so I took the minis out to get primed in my usual zenithal style. Also primed was the dark elf for my chaos renegades team. I’m sure I’ll get around to her some day.

In my previous minis, I’ve painted them using washes over my zenithal prime, but some of the colors take lots and lots of layers. For my underworld team I decided to invest in the Vallejo Game Ink series to see if the more potent inks would speed up the painting process. Vallejo’s Game Inks come in pretty standard colors: Red, blue, purple, yellow, green, green black, dark sepia, brown, skin and black. Jeff gave me the idea I should paint my underworld team black and pink to match the GW dice I picked up a few weeks ago. Vallejo doesn’t make a pink or magenta ink, so I mixed together the Vallejo red ink with the Daler-Rowney white artists acrylic ink I picked up for adding highlights to my undershading. The result was a kind of pastel ink which I think washed with GW’s Carroburg Crimson which resulted in a more hot pink that I was pretty happy with.

I wanted to do a lighter goblin skin than I had for the goblin, orc and troll on my chaos renegades team, so I mixed together a 1:1 ratio of the yellow and green inks. The result is a little more lime green than I was looking for, but I think it pops nicely against the pink armor. That’s two minis painted for the challenge, nine more to go (plus basing) in 11 days. I got this!

Also while I was at it I decided to do some more advanced highlighting and shading on the chaos renegaded minotaur that I had zenithal primed a long while back. I washed him with Nuln Oil then dry brushed with white. After than I used my white ink to pick out some highlights all over him. I think this one is going to turn out quite nice.