The last player outstanding for my Black Orc team was the troll. I bought the armoured troll from Forgeworld as he best fits the already heavily armoured team. The only thing I didn’t like about him was the leg he was holding. To fix that I swapped his hand with that of a Rat Ogre.

The team is already to paint up now, I just need to decide on a colour scheme. Am thinking dark blue or purple, dirty white and rusty silver, maybe with some areas of yellow as decoration.





I also made progress on my aim of having all 80 BB2016 star players. Am down to the last few and these are the tricky ones where there is no obvious model to use as a substitute. I was fortunate that Forgeworld has come to my rescue and brought out a very cool model of Zolcath. Buying him saved me a huge amount of time as he’d have been very difficult to convert from a gorebeast, dragon ogre and other big guy parts as I had originally planned. He didn’t need any work aside from filling in some gaps.




Two types of models sorely lacking in the GW range are female and small humanoids. This made finding conversion parts for Swiftvine very tricky. In the end I settled on using a skink torso as the starting point, it was a little taller than I’d have liked, but a really small model would be harder to add detail to. I had to chop away the tail and scales on the skink’s back and sculpt clothing for her upper body. The feet and lower legs came from blue horrors, whilst the shoulder pads were from tyranids, with a wood pattern carved into them.

Her head was from a wood elf, which I bulked out the hair using greenstuff. Her mouth was cast from a nurgling, eye sockets cast from a Crypt horror, with the eyeballs and nose sculpted. Ears and kneepads were taken from elf models and cut to shape. The roses came from Dreadsycthe Harridans. I went through a few attempts to get the wings right, initially they were going to use bird type wings as a starting point with a lot of greenstuff, but these were never in the right shape and were either too thick or broke. Instead I used bases chopped and sanded to shape with greenstuff to give them the right texture.





The next star I worked on was Kreek Rustgouger. The illustration only shows part of the top half of his body, but the description says his body changes a lot which gave me a lot of leeway. The trailer for BB3 also has Kreek in it and I used that for inspiration as well.

I had bought the old undead Boneripper to use as the basis for this conversion, but he’s too small for ST7. Instead I used the Stormfiends, this would mean he’d be a bit on the large side, but both Deeproot and the Deathroller from Forgeworld were as well. Also because of ball and chain he never goes prone.

The Stormfiends already had a lot of bits that were ideal for the model, I just needed to combine parts from different models with some trimming and gap filling. His left hand was a chaos space marine poer claw. Whilst the right shoulder pads were from Ork Killer Kans, these also supplied some of the parts for the engine on his back.

I used an old dwarf cannon to make the rest of the engine and the power supply on his lower back. This was loosely based on the Cyanide’s version, but I took a lot of liberties and just made something cool and steampunk looking. Various tubes and wires from the Stormfiends were cut to fit the new positioning on his torso and arms along with the tail and a final spike from a 40K chaos daemonic machine.

The area I spent the most time on was his face. This used a giant’s head as the starting point. With the bionic part from Nork Dedogg and the snout and ear from a stormfiend. Extra wires were added to his face and chest, to better match the illustration.




The last star was Glotl, GW haven’t released a BB Krox yet and I wasn’t the biggest fan of the existing AoS models since they are a bit dated.

Instead I went looking for other parts, the original plan was to use the Troggoths combined with spare stormfiend and rat ogre parts from Kreek. The head being from the eel monsters the AoS Deepkin ride. I’d even bought all the boxed sets, just because they were cool and I could use parts for other conversions. All my test models didn’t look right and in particular the hands and arms were either too skinny or bulky.

This required further investigation and that was where I saw the Ogroid Myrmidon from Warcry, he was a very cool model and even in the right pose. Now I just needed a better head, luckily Forgeworld had released a SumpKroc for Necromunda which looking a lot like Glotl and was the right scale.

Most of the assembly was pretty straight forward and didn’t need to change much. Just chopping off his hair and swapping in a troggoth loin cloth. His hands came from rat ogres and feet from dragon ogres. The hardest parts were the armour as sculpting (lizard)man-made objects is hard, especially on a model where you can’t sand them back that easily. His chest piece went through a few versions and I had to abandon sculpting the decoration onto it, though I might try painting it.

The bulk of the 6 weeks I spent working on the model was on the scales and spines. Some of these came from Dragon ogres and others from BB saurus, but the remainder were 50/50 cast or hand sculpted. His tail in particular was difficult as I had to made that blend with his other scales.

I’m actually most proud of how the little details like his necklaces that I hand sculpted turned out.




With these done, I just need 2 more stars to complete BB2016. These are Skrull Halfheight and Rumbelow Sheepskin, Forgeworld have released a good Skrull model and hopefully will bring out one for Rumbelow as he’s in the BB20 book.

The NAF GT has been postponed to 2022 and I had already completed the combined human/old world team meant for the 2020 GT. This means I am free to start any project I like next and am mulling over a few options.

I could work on a vampire team as them along with Crazy Igor all the only models from crp I need to do and the vampires would go towards BB2016. The other outstanding team from BB16 is Snotlings and they might be fun to paint and add some conversions to. I could also start painting the 40 BB16 stars I have made over the past few years, some of them would be fun. One option was working my way through the Spikes, ensuring I had a painted version of all 10 stars and either the team or at least 1 of each positional.

The other option is to start working on the new BB20 teams such as the Black Orcs who are already to go or maybe the Nobles. Finally, I could just do something fun like the Norse team using Bloodreaver and space wolf parts or the steampunk clan Skyre team I have long wanted to make.