I’d finished the bulk of the team by the start of March, which gave me a month and a half to do the troll and some star player.

I bought the armoured troll from forgeworld since I’d already done the plastic one twice for a goblin team and he was more fitting for Black Orcs. Originally I’d swapped his the left hand holding the leg as I thought it looked a bit out of place. But I ended up not being happy with the rat ogre hand used in its place and swapped it back.

The tradition with greenskins is usually that the bigger and tougher they are the darker their hide is. Though for trolls I have always liked having a pale underbelly. For him went for dark green skin, which was highlighted through mid-green to a very light green on his front, inner arms and feet, whilst the scales on his back were painted black and highlighted grey.

His clothing and armour were painted in the same way as the rest of the team. The only other notable change was the leg he was holding and the dwarf skull. I gave that skin a greyish tone, since it was likely from an ogre sized model. I had thought to use the same colouring from the human/old world team from last season, but they also had grey trousers and I wanted more variety. Instead I opted for yellow and this turned out to be one of my fave bits of the whole team, so am glad I added it back.







The troll took a couple of weeks to paint, which meant I could likely only fit in 2 or maybe 3 stars.

I’d yet to do the Black Gobbo yet and he was pretty small and not too complicated to paint, which made him the ideal choice to start with.

Most of his was covered in a cape, and of course that had to be painted black no matter what team he played for. It’s always tough to strike the correct balance between too many highlights looking grey or too little looking flat. I also wanted his cloak to look a bit scuffed and added some extra little lines here and there, I’ve seen some very talented painters use that and tried my best to recreate the effect.

The other change I wanted to do was to experiment with the orange, I think the shade I ‘d used on the normal team members was too dark and got a bit lost in the blue. For him I added more yellow to the orange and made it paler too, this worked really well, in particular on the moon face part of his cloak. I think the orange being separate from the blue, such as the border of the armour really shows it up better.





As Varag came with the BB20 boxed set I really thought he should be done too, even though I have already done the old 5th edition version and a savage orc conversion of him. I think this new one is by far the best and all the previous models were a bit weak. Still don’t know why they didn’t come up with a new Nobility and Black Orc star, Griff and Varag can’t be that popular to merit 4 models.

Varag was painted the same way as the normal Black Orcs, I did make his skin a little lighter as I’m not sure if he’s supposed to still be a normal Orc. The main change was painting his jaw plate orange and he also has a bright orange topknot. I really like how this ended up and in hindsight I should probably have done the shoulder pads of the team orange and then had the markings in white. Coming up with colour schemes that are not just the same ones over and over is always tricky. I do notice that the goblins with white clothing stand out the best and some of the orcs look a bit dark.

The other big difference was the unfortunate ghoul impaled on his shoulder pad. I went for an unhealthy grey skintone for this model as it was probably not in the best shape even before Varag got hold of him.





Varag ended up taking around 2 weeks and so I decided to call the team done, with just a couple of weeks left. I’d considered doing some of the goblin secret weapon stars, but wanted to do them in pairs and the other option of Morg is a large model who would likely take at least as long as the Varag did.

I’d already done the team bases at the same time, but still needed time to take team pics, varnish the models to protect them when playing and wrap them up.



The NAFC is taking place on the 29th and 30th April in Nottingham and I believe some tickets are still available after a few people had to drop out. This team will be won by a coach attending that tourney, think it’s by a raffle.