I’ve never had enough spare time to get my projects complete, so when I got the opportunity to ‘work’ from home I took full advantage of the situation to up my productivity to an eleven.  Blood Bowl is my prime mistress, and I have plenty of projects that have yet to start or have labored at an incomplete status for years.  With my NFL themed Blood Bowl teams still barely started I decided to try and get one division completed.  With my Browns themed Undead team almost done, it was time to get Steelers and Bengals teams going. 

For the Steelers themed team I went with Dwarves as that seemed like an obvious choice.  I do have the Pedro Ramos metal dwarf team from Iron Golems but I wanted to use the GW plastic set. My chief complaints about the ‘standard’ team are the leaping Dwarf Slayers and the repeated poses of the lineman and runners. I had collected a total of five dwarf sprues so I had plenty of spare bits. First was the Troll Slayers. I opted to convert some of GW’s actual fantasy slayers. The fact that they didn’t have much in the way of armor made for relatively easy conversions. The fist model was positioned on a piece of terrain, so I had to keep part of it on the base which was a bit annoying. With so little of the foot in contact with the terrain I was hesitant in removing it. I opted for caution of style so I will have to figure some things out when it comes to basing. Utilizing some arms from the dwarf kit though I was easily able to remove the axes and gave him some suitable player arms. 

The other model I used was the latest Gotrek model. It has more armor that a typical slayer would (and is actually wearing shoes), but the detail on his hair and beard was too good to pass up.  Again, a couple of hand swaps worked okay, but there wasn’t much I could do with the arm raised in the air.  Perhaps he is calling out a big guy with the old “come at me bro”?

For some of lineman I picked up a command sprue of some old plastic dwarf warriors that came out right before the Old World was destroyed by GW. I was able to get the heads to fit fine but there was plenty of gaps that needed filling. I experimented with milliput to fill them which worked but thankfully most of my sloppy work would get covered by paint.  

To prevent duplicate runners, I did a head swap on one and used a lineman arm to change up the posing of the arm not holding the ball. It doesn’t complete change the design of the model, but it gives it enough difference to be noticeable. The head I used for the runner was probably my favorite of the group, so I am pleased with how it came out overall.  

I always do a full 16 player roster but I didn’t have enough heads to do swaps on all the duplicates and some of the sculpts can’t take a head swap without losing an arm and shoulder too. To add some more variety, I turned to the bits box and I cracked open my collection of Citadel skulls.  I probably went a bit too grim-dark with some of the lineman and their use of skulls as hair ties, but Blood Bowl is a crazy world so it will be fine.  

On top of the dwarves, I also put together some odds and ends that were holding up other projects.  It was a long time ago I worked on my undead team and I was a couple of wraiths short after the Necromantic Horror team was updated.  Additionally, I had ‘finished’ a Norse team about the same time but the changes of that roster with the addition of Beer Boars also left it incomplete.  

I’ve been sitting on this Ogre team since around 2014 or so if my math is correct. It’s a resin team from Vortice miniatures that is sculpted by none other than Pedro Ramos. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t require any conversions! I did opt to put the snotling/gnoblars on regular sized bases and not the tiny ones that most people use. I like when the players base fills up the whole square and having such a little guy on a huge base really highlights their lack of size. I only managed to break one of the snotlings during the build too so A+ on that regard. 

This is probably the biggest build I’ve ever done at one time, but it was good fun, and it got a good number of projects started.  Once everything was based it was a long airbrush session getting everything primed for some paint.  Hopefully you’ll see some progress soon.