The NAF have once again asked me to paint a team to be given as a prize at the NAF GT. This will be held in Nottingham on the 29th and 30th of April.

There are still 5 teams I have yet to paint; Black Orcs, Imperial Nobility, Khorne, Snotlings and Vampires, so I picked from these. I have always disliked having duplicate models in a Blood Bowl team, since there are only 16 players they should all be individuals. Though partly this is an excuse to convert models as that is the aspect of the hobby I enjoy the most.

Some of those 5 teams I had ideas for, but they would be extensive conversions and I didn’t know if I would be able to finish them in time to an appropriate standard. I did have a pretty extensive collection of Orc and Goblin parts in my bitz box, which helped me decide on Black Orcs.

I thought painting in batches of 3 would allow me to give each model attention, whilst also speeding up the process. The Orcs would already have dark skin, so I went with a light blue for the main team colour. The clothing would be dark grey, the metal parts a dirty silver, gloves and straps battered brown leather and there would be some white and orange decoration. Bases were mostly dead earth with a few patches of scrubby grass and some lichen.

The first batch I worked on was the standard Goblins with no changes. This gave me the chance to try out the colour scheme on smaller models with less armour. I’d been concerned that my last couple of projects had ended up a bit dark. Buying a new, high quality lamp helped improve my painting, but the problem was that models would not be so well lit when used on the tabletop.





The 2nd batch of goblins use the same bodies, but had limb and head swaps. Some with other models from the set and others used parts from 40K Grots.




The final batch of goblins used the bodies of 40K grots. I mixed in some bits from both the Black Orc and standard goblin sets to BB them up a bit. I really liked how the goblins turned out, the blue and orange were very noticeable next to the more muted colours of their skin and clothing.




As with he goblins the first batch of Black Orcs I painted were just the standard models. They were more challenging as they wore a lot of large, smooth armour pieces. These are really tough to highlight, light blue in particular tends to go a bit streaky, which meant the blue I used was darker than I had initially intended. The larger areas of orange did also not quite work as well as intended. I’d gotten bored of always using the same schemes and tried to mix things up a bit. This scheme was actually based on a sunset I’d seen many years ago, pale blue sky, dark clouds with some bright orange highlights from the setting sun.

In hindsight the bright orange works better with the dark grey. I probably should have used white or bright yellow for the markings as the mid blue is too similar in tone to the orange I used. I considering repainting the markings, but it might take too long and the time would be better spent on star players.




The 2nd batch of Black Orcs had conversions too, these were arm swaps for 2 of the orcs. For the last one I added arms and a head from AoS Big Uns to make the team captain, he’s holding the head of an unfortunate opponent.




I have bought the Forgeworld armoured troll to bring the team up to 16 and will be doing him next. That will complete the team and still leave a good chunk of March and most of April. I always like to add stars to my teams and the Black Gobbo is a must, since I haven’t done him yet. I might have time to do some more, but have to decide on who is best. I don’t think Helmut suits the team, want to save akorne for khorne and don’t have time to do Ripper, nor Grak and Crumbleberry. That leaves; Varag, Morg and the 4 goblin secret weapon stars as I have all those models ready to go.