Dark Elf wooden base – a blood bowl story

I don’t have a great camera, light setup so I hope these all look good to you.  I did these as a project for a friend’s other half – she wanted to keep it fairly standard dark elf. (If you like the blood bowl team and want to buy your own to paint just beware the spikes – the bloody small sharp spikes everywhere!?!)  I did the tokens in my bronze style – I do all my blood bowl tokens and range ruler this way as I don’t really like them in team colours.  Only conversion was the spiked ball. I  have removed the peg from the other egg ball and drilled and installed it in the spiked ball so both can now slot into the holes on the bases – which I will cover in the next bit.  Client is very happy and has them pride of place on her desk so I’m happy ?

First the shots of the finished article, with paint and one with edge highlights and a couple of layers of varnish,  got to  try looking a little shiny – it’s a ship after all ?

I made the mistake halfway through painting the test miniature of asking what base – then listing them all and for some reason I remembered the team board as a ship and offered wood as well (hoping they just went the usual grass route) instant response back was wood – d’oh!  As I wasn’t getting paid a lot I had to think of a way of doing this simply and cheaply so I rummaged  in my daughter’s craft box (as you do) and hello lollipop sticks!

Wood bases for miniatures come in thin planks and for my purposes that was not going to work (I did a test and wasn’t happy with the result, this is a ship not laminate flooring!) So looking at references etc. It looked like one lollipop stick was about the right width for a ship plank, a standard blood bowl base takes 3 widths so time to do a test!

Now I could tell you how to paint it but there are bucket loads of how to paint wood on the interwebs.  Do I will just summarise. For mine I used the wood set from scale 75 and just went from dark to light using a semi-drybrush method.  I left the middle darker than the outside.  Then I used some washes from army painter, highlighted the edges and gloss coat.  The blood was paint and inks mixed, it works but is not brilliant so having a better paint for this is probably going to help.  Then some of them received a painted line.

The white lines – lollipop to the rescue

Paint white on the edge of a lollipop stick, press onto base and magic happens!  It’s not perfectly solid white line but that’s what we are after.

Acceptance – don’t panic, embrace chaos

Lollipop sticks are weak, they will chip in places, just embrace this and treat it like natural part of a wooden thing.

Diversity – in life and miniatures

Don’t just cut 3 straight strips, make some strips out of 2 strips, maybe leave a gap – if you have two pieces butted up to each other use a small drill bit of pin to try make some holes to show the nails.  Differences make things better!

Hope this is helpful to some and hope I can continue to post more, rather than 1 thing a year.  Have fun!