Blood Bowl – Skaven

This project has been a long time in the works but I finally found some time to get it recorded.

Our Story starts many years ago with the relaunch of Blood Bowl, after a long hiatus, in 2016(?). As a long time player (first edition cardboard standees anyone?) I already had both Orcs and Human teams painted and ready for play so I wanted a new team.

When the Skavenblight Scramblers were launched I loved the look of the new plastics and picked them up. Wanting to play in our (at the time) annual Blood Bowl mini league at my local club I gave them a real quick and dirty paint job to get them to the table. Using Vallejo Model Color (VMC) base coats and the Army Painter (AP) soft tone dip, I got them to a standard that I was happy with at the time, but I always said I’d go back and do highlights and detail work to improve things. This obviously never happened because…ooh, look! A squirrel!

Not long after picking the team up I also indulged in a resin Rat Ogre from Forge World and sadly this also languished in a blister pack for many years in my pile of shame potential.

Many months ago the monthly painting competition we run at my local club had the theme ‘Team player’, and I thought Blood Bowl was an obvious candidate to enter. With this new impetus I dug out my Rat Ogre and got him ready for the competition.

For those who don’t know Forge World resin is, in my not so humble opinion, garbage, and this model was no different. It was a pain in the arse to assemble, as gappy as all hell and not very well moulded in places it was soul crushing to assemble. But I got it done.

In order to get a good undertone for the flesh colour I used AP leather brown primer all over the model.

One big issue I had with this paint job was the fact that the original Skaven paint job dated back to a time when I kept very little record of what I painted or how I painted it, so apart from knowing it was probably VMC colours I had very little to go on. However as those models needed a final highlight and clean up anyway I was confident I could transfer the highlight colours from this project to the old models for unified look at the end of it all.

All base coats were applied using VMC paints.

Skin – Cork Brown

Armour – Royal Purple

Armour details – Gold Brown

Straps and Skirt – Black

Claws and teeth – Iraqi Sand

Nose, ears and tail – Pink

Metals – Natural Steel

Tongue and mouth – 50:50 mix of Vermillion/Pink

With base coats down I applied a couple of selective wash steps rather than my usual ‘drown it all in Agrax’ approach. This was a painting competition after all and I wanted to keep the vibrancy of the colours.

The skin was covered in two coats of Vallejo Game Wash Flesh. This wash is very transparent and gives a nice red undertone perfect for living skin.

To darken the armour panels where they met the trim I used a wash of Citadel’s Purple ink thinned with water. I’m not sure this product is available any more but I had it lying around so..? On reflection I was too cavalier with this and I should have pin washed it surgically where I wanted as, even thinned it was really pigment dense and left the armour looking quite splotchy and dark. A quick reapplication of the base colour (Royal Purple) evened things up and I kept away from the armour plate edges to keep the shading where I wanted it.

The teeth were washed with Citadels Seraphim Sepia to give that yellowish tinge that dirty teeth often get and to help define the individual teeth.

For my highlights, most of the areas of the model only got a single highlight, because panting competition or not, I am neither a masochist nor a try-hard.

Skin – 50:50 mix of Flat Flesh/Cork Brown

Armour – 50:50 mix of Royal Purple/Pink

Armour details – Lemon Yellow

Straps and skirt – Black Grey

Nose, ears and tail – 50:50 mix of Pink/Light Flesh

Teeth – Ivory

As a final step I used another old Citadel product (Red Glaze) to add some colour depth to the ogres many scars.

The last step was basing. My original Skaven team was done in some green approximating Citadel’s old Goblin Green with liberal applications of static grass and I wanted this model to match so I used VMC Olive Green before applying static grass, as before.

Being pretty pleased to finally have this model painted, I decided to fulfil my ambition to finish my other Skaven models.

This was where I ran into my next problem. As anyone who has used it knows, one drawback of army painter dip is that it filters everything on the model with a brown overtone. I use softtone dip almost exclusively to minimise this but it is still significant.

The end result was that as I used the highlights from my rat ogre scheme which was vibrant and intense by design the contrast between base tone and highlight would have been crazy strong.

I also knew there was no way on God’s green Earth I was repainting the whole team so…

After experimenting on one (lab) rat I came up with the following colour compromise effectively highlighting the models with tones closer to the base colours of the Rat Ogre.

Armour – Royal Purple

Skin – Cork Brown

Tails and ears – Basic Skintone

Black – Black Grey

Arnour Details – Lemon Yellow

Overall, I am happy with the look of the final team and I don’t think the Rat Ogre sticks out like a sore thumb. The fact his flesh tones and tail colouration are very different is something that works for me. Getting the team uniform closer was more important I feel.