Talk Fantasy Football

I've been commissioned to do the team that will be presented to the NAF Champion again this year.

The only recommendation is that it should be tier 1 or 2. I have planned on painting up all the 24 "official" teams and eventually all the stars as well. This did cause a bit of a rethink as there are only 5 teams I’ve still not done yet; flings, goblins, ogres, vamps and slann. So that rules out 3 of them and my planned vampire and slann teams are both quite involved projects which I may not be able to do properly in the time left.

I considered a few options but finally settled on Dwarfs, the 1st team I had converted and painted up 12 years ago. I'll do a full team of 16 and if I have time I’d like to do a display base, some stars and even re-roll/turn/score markers too.

Now I'm well aware how unpopular Dwarfs can be and I'm sure some of you will be groaning at the thought of another Dwarf team and in the hands of a champion too.
So to try and mitigate that somewhat, these won’t be ordinary boring dwarfs but frenzied, drunken, pillaging, Norse Dwarfs! The idea being that the winner will have the option of using the models as 2 different teams. Though I'm sure that still won't please some.

So below is my test lineman/longbeard.



The tournament moving away from GW HQ has freed me up to use models from any source I want now and AoW just happened to release some lovely new dwarfs recently to go along with their fantastic plastic slayer.

The team will be made up as follows
Longbeards/Linemen – A mixture of AoW slayer and ironbeard parts.
Blitzers/Berserkers – Same as above but using the ironbreaker heads, maybe with gauntlets and 2 shoulder pads.
Dwarf Runners/throwers – same as linemen but in throwing poses with winged helm, and gloved hands.
Runners - same as linemen but in catching or running poses and bare head (this will mean a total of 4 runners but they could be linemen or coaches).
Ulfwereners/slayers – Either GW or AoW slayers converted into wereslayers, bestial faces and lots of body fur!
Snow Troll/Deathroller – initially this was going to be another mechanical beast, but I’m thinking a conversion of the Dark Eldar Clawed Fiend with a rider or maybe some bionics.

What really sold me was an article I saw on Warseer about how to do ice bases. So I've spent the last couple of weeks acquiring all the stuff I need. The process is pretty laborious and I had to get a lot of stuff, but it does open up all sorts of possibilities for me in regards to future projects so I see it as an investment.

Test base below.



For stars we already have some crossover
Boomer – dwarf with bomb (or snow balls?) maybe use the shells from the Dwarf cannon and give him a face mask
Flint/helmut – a dwarf with chainsaw (or ice saw and hockey mask?), I like the idea of him leaping in the air with the saw held aloft.
Zara – Valkyrie, either based on Queen Helga or human sized using saint Celestine or khornate heroine
Morg – A Viking ogre, not really a fan of this as he may look too cartoony

The others are
Barik – dwarf with bazooka, no great ideas for him and I see him as a rubbish star
Icepelt – a bigger version of the snow troll, again no great ideas

The last is
Grim/Wilhelm – I'm thinking a bigger were-slayer, using Garagrim ironfist

Hey Spubbbba,

I just had Michael Rothery do up a Norse team for me. I must say it looks pretty brilliant.
I have all the Star Player's available for the team as well. The team is a combination of figs from GW and stuff on Impacts site.

For Boomer we used the Thunderhammer Dwarf catcher (Michael modelled a bomb in his catching hand).

For Morg I used the Black Scorpion Ogre. He isn't quite as big as the GW Morg but he is very stocky and has a viking helmet.

And I love the MDP Snow Troll for Icepelt. The mammoth head works well as a fur and could easily be given a snowy themed look.

Cheers,
Michael

Hi Ross

Looks great. Look forward to more WIP pics as you go along if you have them. Very intrigued to see the finished article!

Brendan

The idea sounds great - I'm looking forward to seeing the results. The test subject works pretty nicely. Good luck working on them between now and May!

I've assembled the other 6 linemen now, below is a pic of them held together with blu tac.



I've since glued them and started work hiding the joins and gaps with greenstuff and adding hair at the backs of their helmets. The plan is to have them all finished this week so I can start painting them in April whilst assembling the rest of the team.

Speaking of which I've started work on the Blitzers as well now.


The top half of them are ironbreakers and I've added some arms from the 5th edition humans. The Dwarf on the right is actually an undead ironbreaker so he's going to need a fair bit more work to give him a full beard and hair.


The bases are progressing as well, this pic shows the 3 stages of painting, blue ink, followed by pale blue and then white highlights.

I've made a fair bit of progress since my last post and feel I am on target with 7 weeks till the tournament.

All the Longbeards/Linemen have been done and glued onto the bases, they just need to have numbers painted on them.





I have completed both the Blitzers/Berserkers as well. I am really happy with how these have turned out and hope they look sufficiently different from the linemen to be easily identifiable since they have 2 shoulder pads, face masks and gloves.



The next players to work on will be the Throwers/Runners. 1 will be in the standard unoriginal pointing and shouting pose, whilst the other has a mask with aiming aid and is holding the ball made from 2 cannon shells. They still need some greenstuff love and hair added to the back.



I'm hoping to have time to do stars as well, ideally a larger were slayer to use as Grim Ironjaw/Wilhelm Chaney and also a player with a chainsaw for Flint/Helmut.



I doubt I will have the time or inspiration to do Zara, Boomer, Morg, Icepelt or Barik sadly. A display base is still a possibility though.

Looking good mate! I wish I was playing this year so I'd have a chance to win them.

Looking very nice. The only one I'm not sold on is the Blitzer using the Undead helmet - has a bit of a "pinhead" look to him if I'm honest. Bit late now, given that it's painted, but (imo) it could have done with being bulked out a little).

Would love to have made it this year, I'm in need of a Norse team (ah, who am I kidding - with my playing skill, I'd have been limited to taking pics of it from the bottom tables! ).

Great conversions... and thx for showing this ice base thing!

Just thinking about to paint the Greebo "Sno" Team next and to do some
other than " gras-based-bases" would be interesting. I bought already
some snow-stuff, but a bit ice would be nice, too.

Traveller

I’ve made more progress since my last blog but the deadline is rapidly approaching with just 3 weeks to go.



Both throwers have been finished now, these use torsos from GW models, a cannon crewman and champion.
I don’t know why but for some reason a winged helm seems appropriate for throwers, maybe it’s because of the High Elf Phoenix warriors. The mask on the other gives him a targeting eye to help with the much feared Dwarf passing game.



The 2 runners are very simple conversions using some old marauder giant slayers. The only tricky part was routing their hair to fit in the shoulder pads.
I thought they would be useful to as slayers on a dwarf team if someone didn’t want to use the were-slayers. I procrastinated a lot with these guys as I wanted one of them to be in a more dynamic catching pose but so few dwarf models have interesting poses with them being a bit stumpy. The guy on the right/left looks more like a baseball player with that glove sadly. I am not as happy with these 4 as the linemen and blitzers.

I’m a little worried that the positionals might not be that easy for opposing players to tell apart. As I was painting the runners I hit upon the idea of giving all the players colour coded hair. So both runners are blonde since they have agility access, this would mean redoing some of the other player’s beards to make the throwers have white/light grey hair, the blitzers reddish brown and the linemen brown (it should really be grey going by the old colour codes but brown allows more variety and suits Norse better). I will probably only do this if I finish ahead of schedule, I’d much rather spend that time on the stars or a display base.



My sculpting abilities are pretty mediocre and I find it difficult to add fine greenstuff detail to existing models. So I hit upon the idea of using beastmen heads for the 2 were-slayers. The guy on the right is a mordheim slayer that I’ve had in my bits box for ages. I routed out his mouth and back Mohawk to fit the shoulder pad in and replace it with a beastman gor mouth. The other slayer uses the standard from the AoW berserkers with the head of an ungor and arms chopped off. Both models use hands from ghouls, but since they are a bit skinny I added a lot of fur to the back of their hands and fingers. I sculpted a lot of fur onto their back, arms and legs as well. I went for a darker skin tone on them, starting with brown and working up to dwarf flesh.
The guy on the left is supposed to be howling at the moon but he does look a little like Slayer Jesus.



This is a mock up of the deathroller/snow troll, he stills needs more mechanical bits added along with some more fur on his arms and tail. I’m thinking of painting the bones brass or silver to make him look mechanical rather than undead, and possibly give him a buzz or claw saw arm to represent claw/MB, the claw is blu tac'd on where it would be.
This will be the next model I complete as he’s the only model I have to get done to make a normal team of 16. Anything after that will be a bonus.



Both Flint and Grim are being greenstuffed so not much to show pic wise for them. But I have done some work on a cheerleader, I’d bought a couple of them to add to my 2nd edition dwarf collection so thought I’d put her to good use. I had the horned helm left over from converting queen Helga into a chav slayer (complete with a half elf, a half goblin and a half chaos dwarf baby) and combined that with some of the platted hair you get with the AoW berserkers, I added some fur to the top of her boots too. Cheerleaders are kind of useless but she will be pretty easy to paint so she’ll be done if I can get the stars completed on time.

I’ve bought a white picture frame to make a display base, but will have to look at how easy it will be to do the ice on such a large scale considering there will need to be huge holes in the foam to accommodate the bases.

Looking super-sweet!

Drooollll......

I was going to take vampires for a laugh, but may have to put the orcs back in the box for some serious competition.

/me wants!

Does this mean I should take Vampires? lol

Oh, already put forward team 20, lizards

Like the team.

The slayers look very cool and they really have frenzy! But claws are a bit overpowered for them

kithor2002 wrote:The slayers look very cool and they really have frenzy! But claws are a bit overpowered for them

You did notice they're being built to be played as Dwarf or Norse?