In which our hero refreshes some old friends

While mucking about in my frightening piles of Blood Bowl flotsam the other day I stumbled upon the poor, downtrodden reminders of Blood Bowls past that was my skaven team.

Sad rats were sad.

When I took the fateful plunge into Blood Bowl back in 1990 I started strong, setting a course for fiscal irresponsibility which I would stay to till this day by not only being the schmuck who funded the core game for myself and my friends to play, but getting my skaven team right then and there.

And so it's very likely that those battered old rats are responsible for everything that followed - my compulsive obsession with fantasy football minis, phigs, Elfball, that damn Khemri team, GRF, the whole shebang. Laughter, tears, terror and triumph and rats.

They certainly looked like minis who'd launched a hobby twenty years ago, played dozens upon dozens of matches, bounced from state-to-state, and wound up in a plastic bag in a box in a garage.

The paint, primitive and clumsy to begin with, was in tatters, with metal peeking through every lump and bump that'd been lumped and bumped over time. The basing material had mostly flecked off (lesson learned on using railroad scenic coal, messy and fragile), and the conversions were mostly coming apart.

Looking at them made me a little sad. Didn't they deserve better?

It wouldn't take too much to fix the old rodents up, I thought. We have the technology, we can rebuild them.

So I did.

I didn't want to repaint them. Stripping them to metal and starting from scratch wouldn't be honoring their long history, it would be eradicating it. No, I just wanted to fix them. Clean up the dings, update the poorly painted flesh and loincloths, and give them better basing - make the old team new again, and make them stand beside my vastly-improved modern paint jobs.

So I did.

And here they are.

I've done a lot here. The fur was given a touchup where the paint had flecked off and a good wash cover to get a more consistent and appealing tone. The fleshtone areas were redone entirely, replacing the original drybrushed shading. The loincloths and grey on the armor were redone from base colors in blended shades to remove the original sloppy wash shading. I updated the accent color from purple to red for a bit more pop, and used my usual basing technique for collection consistency.

That said, other than the accent colors, all of the original colors are the same. Additionally, all surface details - numbers and symbols, is original except the belt buckles. It's what I had hoped for, my trusty old skaven team, pretty much exactly the way it has always been, suddenly painted as well, and able to be shown off as proudly, as my current teams.

To give a better impression of the degree of improvement, not only over the previous paintjob, but also over what had come to be their current state, here is a comparison shot with one of the unrefreshed originals.

Definitely not a week wasted. I'm beyond pleased with this project.

Happy rats is happy.