I’ve been powering through the undead lately, and managing to complete 3-4 models a week which is pretty good progress for me.

As stated in my earlier blogs, the plan for this team is to have 16 zombies that can represent all the 24 NAF Approved teams plus the 3 most popular unofficial teams (khorne, Bretts and Apes). Some teams can’t be made zombies whilst other zombies represent multiple teams (the generic ones I completed first could be used as humans, Bretts, marauders, norse or pit fighters).

I saved a lot of time using Willy and Meiko racial zombies, but a Apojar wasn’t a fan of some of these so instead I converted them from my bits box. Since I’ve been collecting, painting and converting models for over a ¼ of a century I have a pretty extensive bitz box and can often delve into that for new projects.


The skaven model was converted from a plastic clanrat with the head from a plagemonk and arm from a skeleton along with a kroot shoulder pad. The hobgoblin was a standard GW BB version with bits from plaguebearers. Whilst the lizardman was another existing model with some rotten bits from plague bearers with his hand and jaw being leftovers from the undead rat ogre Boneripper that I used for my Norse Dwarf team.


These models were painting in the same way as the rest of the team. I added brown and grey to their normal flesh tones and a turquoise glaze to suggest a rotten tinge to their skin. I also used grey for highlighting the lizardmen scales and skaven fur to again make it look decayed and unhealthy.


The ghouls were mostly pretty straightforward, using the Neomics models. Apojar did want me to convert one to be holding a ball so I had to do a little arm swapping and added a greenstuff ball.


Since these guys are still alive I changed my technique for their skin tone. I added grey to pale flesh to represent their lack of cleanliness and unsavoury eating habits that led to their debased nature.

This just leaves the slann, elf and ape zombie to make. I’m struggling with them as my slann zombie has still to turn up and I may well have to cobble together the ape from other bits.


After my last blog about what team to paint up for the NAF GT 2017, I have made a decision to go with generic skaven, using a similar colour scheme as Skitter. I feel this is a good compromise between doing a unique team and expediency due to my time constraints. Much of the team will be using the new standard models, but I will be mixing in some conversions to ensure all players are unique. The plan is to paint up a team as 12 as you would get with the boxed set, adding some conversions so all the models are unique. I should be able to get this done by the mid-Feb before I have to move. Then if I have the time I will paint up an extra lineman, 2 gutters and Rat ogre to bring them up to 16. If I still have time after that then I’ll paint up the 3 stars Hakflem, Glart and Fezglitch.

GW have reused parts of the CAD designs from their stormvermin, clanrat and warhammer quest skaven deathrunner models as the basis for this team. This is a bit lazy of them, but those are all good looking models and it does help with conversions. I already had a full box of the clanrats and stormvermin and have bought 2 deathrunners to use as conversions.


The first 3 linerats have been left unchanged as I like the models, I’m using pretty much the same colour scheme as Skitter as that worked great with skaven. I have made a slight change from skitter and given them brown fur as I want to keep black fur for the blitzers to mark them as elite. I also ended up using a different shade of orange for their armour, the brown and orange I mixed together looked more yellow that I intended. I meant to give this a red glaze to make this a slightly stronger orange but used a wash instead which made it quite a deep orange. I liked how this looked and it would mean that this wasn’t too close to the waterbowl team so have decided to keep it.

I wanted the team to be slightly dirty as they were skaven and Blood Bowl takes its toll on the uniform. However I prefer my teams to look good on the pitch and only added minor damage. Their armour got a brown wash to make the orange look a bit dirty and the metal slightly rusty. I also used a new technique for adding battle damage to armour. Previously I had painted the chips and dents to resemble metal armour that had been painted, similar to car bodywork with base coat and metal showing through. This time I made it look like the armour had either been repainted multiple times or was orange throughout painting brown dents into it with a small highlight at the bottom.
I’ll be making minor conversions for the other linerats, head or limb swaps with each other or fantasy battle models. I do think the team needs a 7th linerat and will need buy or convert him from somewhere.


Whilst I really like the thrower model, I don’t want duplicates with so few models to paint.
One of the throwers will be the existing model, but the other is converted from a deathrunner. I have swapped in the head and arm for those from a stormvermin model and added a hand from the spare thrower to be holding a ball to the ground. I am contemplating giving the throwers white fur since I usually associate them with being the older and wiser positional players.