I’ve had it on my todo list for a long while to get back to the kind of photography I was doing before I moved into a tiny apartment and got really lazy about pulling all the equipment out, and setting it all up for a single model, then putting it all away. We moved about 6 months ago and have more space now. Then I back the MacroMat Kickstarter and it arrived yesterday. And I finished a model today, and had some spare time to move some stuff around. The stars were aligning.
Here’s a rat!
The GW Skaven box doesn’t come with enough Gutter Runners to run a proper team, which is a little silly and the cause of much argument in CHOP! chat. I don’t know why GW made this decision, but my policy has generally been to try to overlook such things and fix it myself. It is a hobby, after all!
I had Little Pat sculpt me two more Gutter Runners out of some Clan Rats he had. This guy is my favourite of the two, but you’ll see the other guy really soon I’m sure.
I made a mistake on the photography, I think, and set my aperture to 11 when I really should have done much higher, and didn’t check my focus location carefully enough. Consequently, you can see the line where the model is in focus versus out of focus, and that line is slightly before the middle of the model.
This is my new setup. I put it all together this afternoon, took these photos…then left it up. Madness! I turned the lights off, obviously. That, plus a new computer a few months ago and a new photo editing program, and the process from click to upload is pretty damn fast! Not as fast as the phone, unfortunately, since the phone can just upload immediately.
The MacroMat comes with 3 different backgrounds – the gradient blue, a speckled black and a speckled brown. I think the black one is my favourite for this model, and that’s the super nice thing – I can choose which background depending on the colours on the model and what will contrast best!
I also got a flash for my camera since last I used it for this blog, so I’ve now got 2 side lights and 1 front light and things are well lit. The only thing left is that the lights aren’t portable, because of how I’ve done the difuser for them. My ideal setup would be one I could take to the club on a photography day or something. We’ll see how it goes, maybe my lights are portable enough. 🙂
The Skaven Blood Bowl box only comes with 2 Gutter Runners, but 4 are pretty much required to play. I commissioned Patrick to sculpt me a couple Gutter Runners from a Clan Rat base, inspired by these models. I wish I’d taken a photo before I primed them!
I also bought an Island of Blood Rat Ogre from a friend and tossed him on some cork. Cork is the best way to make a model fit on a base smaller than it’s footprint. 😛
Here’s a start to finish of a single Stormvermin. I just picked him out of the pile to be the first test model. He’s a lot lighter than I had imagined, but I also was imagining a scheme identical to my Veer-myn scheme from years ago. (just went back to look at details on that link – those are poorly done models all over the place. >.>)
The base coat was 3 simple colours – Zamesi Desert skin, Emperor’s Children cloth and Mithril Silver armour and other metal bits.
I highlighted that base coat by taking the Zamesi and mixing it with Dheneb Stone, and the Emperor’s with White Scar and doing 3 quick layers.
Then it gets really chaotic. Seraphim Sepia over the skin, wiped away the tops. SW Amethyst similarly on the cloth, but this got a little messy, I might do the Drakenhof first next time. Drakenhof in the silver parts, some Nuln Oil in places that needed more contrast.
I applied the decals at the wrong moment, after I’d finished all of this and it didn’t look great so I had to go back again and re-metal and re-shade over the decal. Next one I’ll do the decal after the base coat.
The base is simple as you can likely see – black edges are classy, Vallejo Goblin Green over. I won a pack of Rain City Hobbies flowers at the Blood Bowl Foodbowl so I glued some flowers to my rats base for fun. 😀
MegaBowl was a lot of fun yesterday! There were some definite hi-jinks in play, including Greg leaping a Slann into a boxed off ball, picking up the ball on a 6, throwing it on a 6 and catching it…on a 6. But for me, the highlight of the day was seeing my boards being played on!
I played an Undead roster of:
Count Luthor Von Whatever
Hack Enslash (no ref means Chainsaws were everywhere!)
1 Wight with Guard
4 Ghouls — 2 with Block, 2 with Wrestle
4 Zombies – 1 with Tackle, which I never used.
Here’s a photo of the middle of the board on turn 2 of my first game:
That’s a lot going on in a few squares.
Here’s the setup:
The dugout come out looking great, even though I enlarged the images by a bit, this was my biggest fear!
Every $5 you donated gave you $100,000 in Blood Bowl cards, and you had to give $50,000 to 2 different opponents (out of 3 people). This was a clever scheme to keep the game balanced while encouraging a little bit of screwing over your friends, but in the end it felt a little petty and arbitrary to exclude one person.
My team! I was planning to put a photo of my Luthor proxy/conversion up, but forgot to take a clear photo of him. It’s a Guild Ball Ghast model from the Morticians faction. I think the Guild Ball models are some of the best looking modern models I’ve ever seen, and I’m a little sad that I bought them and never truly got into it. This is the first GB model I’ve ever painted, and it’s not even for the faction I play!
I don’t plan on doing a version 2 of the board right now, but here are a few notes I took from playing on it:
The little “+”s that demarcate the squares, should be white with black drop shadows. This is what FF-Fields does, and it’s specifically so that the squares can be found no matter what the background is. The black “+”s looked fine on the snow background sections, but in the middle with the dirt they were very hard to see properly.
The rules hadn’t been finalized before I finished the board, so I didn’t know that the Line of Scrimmage on this board is straight across the lines of the dugouts, not at the center where I’ve depicted it. I would add another 4 lines to note this.
The rules have an oddity to them whereby you can’t cross the two squares at the very corner of each of the dugouts. I didn’t realize it until I played the game, but this is to prevent people from having an easy out around the corner – it’s much harder to block this passage without this rule. However, the rule is an “exception” to normal movement, and so could be forgotten. I thought to add a little spiked-thing or something, jutting out from the corner of the dugouts into that square, to help remind people they can’t travel that way.
A few rules issues that bugged me, but overall a great day of Blood Bowl!
I asked GW if I could do a review of the new box about a month back. They were kind enough to write back saying they’d send my request along, but unfortunately I never heard anything about it afterwards. So as much as I’d like to have a little disclaimer here about how this was “paid advertising”, it isn’t. Maybe next time!!
This is going to be a long one.
I want to start with how pleasantly surprised I was at my local non-GW games store getting so many of these boxes. I’d heard that small stores were only going to be able to get 1 Skaven box per 5 core boxes they had ordered, which is ridiculous in a game that has such a big existing community. So, good start.
I have no idea how much it cost, but I picked up the Death Zone book, this box and the warpstone dice for about $100 CAD which wasn’t unreasonable.
Whats in the box?
It’s a cool looking box.
There are two of these sprues inside it. I love how full this sprue is!
There’s a Skaven theme decal transfer sheet! I paid extra money for such a thing when I made my Dreadball rats, and I’m totally going to use the shit out of this one!
The models were easy enough to clip out of their sprues, with only a few awkward angles. Every piece is pretty easy to figure out where it’s supposed to go. I lined them all up on the instructions to make sure each rat was right, but I think it would be very hard to mess this up as each model has very specific tongue-and-groove fittings.
Also on each sprue are a little Blood Bowl marker and 4 ball tokens. I don’t know what the one with the hand is supposed to be, but there are two awesome looking warpstone themed balls that fit into the little hole on the bases, and one free-standing ball.
Lastly on the back of the assembly instructions is a short army list. I’m a little disappointed here, as while it contains all of the rules for each model in the box, it doesn’t have rules for the rat ogre. One more table row would have made this a complete army list for the Skaven, but someone decided not to include it. Maybe they didn’t have space, since there are 3 translations here, but I think a complete roster would have better, and maybe would have helped entice new players to seek out and buy a model for it!
I’m a little sad that the box doesn’t have more of a complete team, needing just 1 more linerat, 2 gutter runners and an ogre to finish it off. The ogre I definitely wouldn’t expect to be in here. I also think that 12 models is a good place to be, and if you had to pick 12 out of the 16 possible, these are a good 12. But buying a second box and not needing 9/12 of the models is annoying. When/if they put out an individual box of Gutter Runners and a Rat Ogre, it will be amazing. But that last line rat is going to bug me for a while.
Assembly
Assembly was a breeze. I’m miserable at mold lines, but near as I can tell these are barely visible at all. The sprue venting holes are placed in easy places to clean off (shoulder plates mostly) and in one case is completely covered by a piece that is placed over it.
I really like the new inclusion of a hole on the base for the ball to fit in, and I also really really like that they went to 32mm bases. 25mm is too small for Blood Bowl.
The models are really damn good looking, but aren’t at “bloody amazing”. The poses are great, and really dynamic. When I first saw the photos I was stunned, but the more I look at them, the more I feel that the details are just a little soft. I’m also very concerned about these tails. I’ve heard of some folks cutting them off and magnetizing them and I may do that myself shortly. There is no chance that the throwers tails will survive transport.
I glued them together with plastic glue, but I don’t think they needed gluing if you didn’t want to. The tongues were all push tight enough they would stay together without it. But with that, I wish they were green plastic or something. 😛
Here are some close ups! Nice thing about having duplicate of each model is I can take one photo and show multiple sides. 🙂
Death Zone
I don’t have any photos of the Death Zone book. It’s nice, but doesn’t have enough difference from LRB6 to make it super worthwhile. I mean, there are a few differences you’ll need to know about, but that’s not my thing to talk about, I let others do so. It’s a nice book, buy it if you want more Blood Bowl in GWs future.
Dice
The dice are crazy. Translucent green, with a sweet font for the numbers, the BB symbol is on the 6, all the dice you need to play the game and it comes in a cool little box.
A friend recommended I check the dice for bubbles, since he’d known other GW produced dice to have issues. I did under my desk lamp – no bubbles I could see.
Also, unlike some other GW dice (the Khorne ones), these ones feel and roll like actual dice, rather than like plastic toys.
They were a total impulse buy, and cost $16 for something I did not at all need.
Summary
The box is awesome, and I’m looking forward to individual releases for more. The models are great. The book is good, but you could probably get away without it. The dice are sweet, and kind of expensive.
I made 3 skeletons before this season started, assuming that I’d realize part-way through that the common internet wisdom that zombies were way way better than skeletons would turn out to be a little exaggerated.
It is not exaggerated, zombies are just plain better.
One of them is in my roster, because I paid for him and then that was that. One of them has been ripped off his base so I could use the base for a special project. And one of them has been converted into Hack Enslash, an Undead Star Player.
Clayton was good enough to give me an ork nob choppa which I split into two pieces, both of which were only about the size of my model. This was the best option — every other chainsaw was easily twice the size of him!
I’m playing Foodbowl this Sunday, and if you’re at all interested in Blood Bowl you should sign up and come to the Fraternal of Order of Eagles. It’s a special 4-player game that’s going to be some crazy mayhem!
This one I’ve been keeping under my hat for a while because I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for Clark. I designed a special board for the Foodhammer Blood Bowl event this weekend!
It started by Clark asking if I could modify an existing board, or make a new one, to make it CHOP!/Foodhammer themed. I said maybe and looked at the board he wanted to modify. The image was about 1000×1000 pixels, which when printed at 300dpi would be about 10 inches squared, which is much too small. So you print it at…I dunno, 100 dpi and it becomes 30 inches squared but would look pixellated and likely awful. And I told him I didn’t think I could design a board, just getting the squares right would be next to impossible!
Then something ticked over in my brain — I could write a computer program to generate the squares! I spent an evening and got it writing out a PNG that was a cross of two 26×14 boards overlapping each other. Then I told Clark I’d think about it. 😛
Days later I had built a prototype. I don’t remember the exact steps, but there was a lot of layering in Paint.net. I had an all snow background on the bottom, then the logo and dugouts on top, then words over that and then the squares overlaying it all.
Then came the process of making it cooler. I showed the draft to Clark and he had a great number of suggestions on how to make it better. I cursed, and went to work again. 😛
Here’s a look at the final board:
And the final copy from the printers came this weekend!
Here’s a few things that came out of this:
I learned how to make realistic blood splatter. There is a blood splatter font, and you can use masking and such to make it look pretty gruesome.
This is the only part I “borrowed” from the internet – the dugouts are made from these dungeon tiles. They were almost the right size, and I wanted dungeon dugouts but didn’t want to draw them myself so I resized them. We’ll see if they look good. >.>
I learned how to make an almost realistic snowy background over dirt. You can see the end result above, but before I did that, I made a small prototype to see if I could make it look good:
It’s two different dirt textures with careful erasing, and a large variety of white textures with careful feathering and erasing.
Here are two links, but be warned they are massive images. In order to get a 35 inch square game board to print at 300dpi, you need to have 10748×10748 pixels, which ends up being 252mb.
The Paint.net file (365mb). This version has all of the layers separated so you could potentially edit and make your own board from it! Let me know if you do so, I would love to see if anyone else makes their own from it!
This was an exciting experience as it’s the largest thing I’ve ever graphic-designed, and I’m not really a graphic designer but I’m really enjoying drawing all of these gaming aids! I’ll get to play on it this weekend at Foodbowl!
It’s not as cool as I had hoped in my heart of hearts, but it’s something. I wanted small and portable, and this thing will fit into my GW case pretty easily because of the modularity of the pieces.
The red dirt looks really nice on the model bases, but done large like this I think it’s a little gaudy, and the highlights/contrasts are a little difficult looking to my eyes.
And even though I made good use of the Basius, it’s too flat and needed maybe a cliff or something to set some elements apart.
Maybe I’ll re-do the back bit with a little rise in the future. Or maybe I’ll leave it as is…
I had the pleasure of gutting Ryan during our league game this month. He’s playing Nurgle, and after having played against Nurgle a few times, I think they might be a hard team to play. I might also be very lucky against them, taking out their Claw or Mighty Blow or Claw/Mighty Blow players early in each game. 😛
I killed 2 of his guys, but one of them had Regeneration (so was ineligible for Resurrection). Thankfully this rotter died as well, and he’ll make a lovely Zombie for my team! His name is Chickenpox Clark. And I only ever remember the names of the guys I raised from the dead. 😛
He’s super simple at this point, white primer, Dheneb Stone all over and sepia in the recesses. I probably should have highlighted up first, but here we are. He’ll need to be more of a sickly green before I’m done, and more green than the ghouls are even though they are basically the same paint scheme at this point.
I got a little drunk — enough to think that starting the next step of this project would be a good idea, but not so much that I couldn’t actually do it. The project has been staring at me, haunting me, since my last post, because the next thing I needed to do was going to be very hard.
I decided, after consulting with my gaming club, to use FixIt Sculpt. I would use a board to press pieces of putty into the Basius, then slide the piece off the board and onto my display board. Because I only had a small section of texture to work with, this would require quite a bit of sculpting to mend the edges of each piece of putty.
I started…
I started just by just placing the putty, then cutting away where I needed bases and terrain pieces to go.
After a while, I realized this wasn’t the best plan and started using the bases to cut into the putty. I’d apply it to the board, then press the base/terrain in where I’d drawn the circle and pull away the cut putty. This gave much nicer circles than cutting by hand!
The above two photos are the process. Use that tool to slide the putty off the board and onto my display board.
It took me 3 sessions to get to this point. I realized at the end of the second session that I’d totally messed up the count. >.< No idea why I thought 12 was the right number!! So I’m going to cut up a second board to nestle in behind the first, and cut only 4 spaces in it.
If you look carefully, you’ll see a new addition to my team on the left…
Painting this thing is going to be relatively easy. The bases are just Dark Flesh, Mephiston Red and then a bunch of Sepia to shade. I had originally planned on putting some simple green flock in places, to mimic the CHOP! boards we have, but never got around to it. With this project, I think I’ll get that flock on the bases as well as on the board, to help bring some other colours to it.
Between my conversions, paint job and this board, I can’t help but to steal best painted for this season!
