Another great sporting event falls to covid-19

Blackwell Badgers BloodBowl Bow Buggered by Bilious Blight

At the end of the previous post I was about to venture into the world of competitive BloodBowl. Alack and alas! My nascent coaching career has been furloughed before it's even begun, stymied by travel restrictions and social distancing in response to the global pandemic. But I spit* in the eye of Nurgle. Far from being discouraged, I am taking on a second BloodBowl team. Arise the Orks! I'm still considering team names (Bromsgrove Basherz? Adam'z Ard Boyz? more thought required...) but I'm sticking pretty close to the "standard" Ork colour scheme from the BloodBowl box - green skin (duh), red armour, white/beige cloth.

This painting exercise needed a slightly different approach. The Badgers are mainly painted in blue - a colour scheme I had practiced with my early miniatures - so I felt confident to dive straight in. Orks are an entirely new horizon to aim for. What are the best paint combinations for green skin that stands out but isn't radioactive? What colours work best as highlights on red surfaces - pure white? pink? orange? yellow?

Answering those questions took a long time - and a lot of trial and error on my first Ork lineman. This fellow took me considerably more time than any of the other miniatures I've painted since coming back to the hobby - probably 10 hours or more - but I'm okay with that; there are about a dozen different approaches across different bits of skin and armour, and buried under layers of tries and re-tries. In the end I have a model that I'd be happy to field in a game, a good grasp of how I want my team to look, and a good idea of how to achieve it.

Now I just have the rest of the lock-down to paint up the rest of the team!

On a separate hobby-related note, albeit not related to this hobby, I've invested in a set of second-hand Kenko extension tubes for my Nikon camera. Combined with my Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 lens and controlled from my laptop** I've got a pretty decent macro setup for £60 - a lot less than the cost of a good, dedicated macro lens. Next on the to-DIY list is a soft-lighting tent so I don't have to mess about with bits of white card at wierd angles to get even lighting on my minis!

* metaphorically; anyone spitting -in the eye of a dark God or otherwise - would be breaching quarantine and liable to immediate liquidation by police drone (that's pretty much home office guidance isn't it?)

** I run Ubuntu (or raspbian) on all my home computers, so I use the foss Entangle software for linking up to my D90 - works well, but I do have to remember to turn live view off before taking a shot or  the connection gets all confused. I should probably file a bug report on that...