There's been yet more activity in my current Blood Bowl brushing bonanza. In addition to painting some new models, I first added some more detail to Prince Moranion, who I'd painted incredibly badly back in the day. Sure, he's still bad, but at least it's a partial improvement.

Of the three contrast paints I bought years ago, I'd only ever used one. That was the browny orange I tried on some of my trees a bit back. I was very disappointed when it created no highlights or shadows at all.

To give them another go, I thought I'd try the blue, as I had some scales on a lizard star player to deal with. This should have been a slam dunk, as it's the perfect place for contrast paint. Instead, I once again got a flat tone across the entire area, as if I'd just painted on a semi-transparent dark blue. In addition, it didn't even properly run into all the nooks and crannies, and left quite a few little white dots.

I am well pissed. These paints are clearly shite and not up to the task they've been created for. I'd bought them for my 40K Orks, which I've already undercoated white, but it looks like I'll have to come up with another solution.

It was a bit of a surprise when I recently found my Fungus The Loon model in the loft. This is odd, as other than a lot of duplicate star players, all of my other Blood Bowl models are close at hand and in my proper carry cases. What's also odd is that I painted my goblins back in the 90s, and gave them an update in 2011, but I somehow forgot about Fungus during both of these times?

I originally thought that maybe I missed Fungus because he never played for Chaos, and back in the day Nobbla and Scrappa were painted up for my Chaos team rather than my Orcs. But I don't think this can be the case, as Bomber Dribblesnot never played for Chaos either. So why didn't I paint Fungus back then as well?

I'm odd sometimes.

Still, it was his time, and as he was already undercoated white, I thought I'd go full on clown mode for probably the craziest Blood Bowl character.

I also painted up another one of the Black Scorpion players I got years ago. I'd already used one as Soaren Hightower, so this one I painted up as another elf in Hubris Rakarth. The model really doesn't suit that character, but it will do. Maybe a replacement model will be found at some point. And if not, who cares?

Another long forgotten task was to paint my dwarf team that I cobbled together back in 2011. All I'd done on these was to slap some flesh colours down a couple of years later, but other teams kept cutting in line ahead of them. Well now it was their turn.

They really are a pretty crappy set of conversions, especially that dreadful Deathroller. Plus, they're painted in various browns, which is not my favourite colour by any stretch. It's a shame that they became the best team in our old Blood Bowl league. I could really do with a set of models worthy of their status.

I was hampered pretty badly when trying to paint these, as I developed a bad back and neck which hung around for days. With their uninspiring colour scheme also affecting my motivation, it took quite a while longer than I'd originally hoped. I didn't help my cause when I decided to re-install my laptop, which took well over a week. Windows 10 is just so bloated, but so fragile when you try and remove things, that the experience left me wanting to throttle the Microsoft developers.

Even when I was working on them, I didn't really try anywhere near as hard as I should have done. I would say even less so than the skaven team.

The only thing that turned out alright was using transfers on the base rim to denote the player numbers, as I usually paint them on and they tend to look kinda pants. Those numbers were from my Chaos team's transfer sheet, but I'd better not tell the dwarves that.

And so, there's another task done, and removed from the massive list.

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After some shenanigans, more Blood Bowl models have been completed.

After some years of inactivity, I've been thinking about Blood Bowl a lot these last few months. As well as the gears turning in my tiny brain concerning rules for another dive into the E.R.L., I've also been tempted to get some painting done.

After painting those last two star players, I continued walking down this path by choosing three more.

These included Varag Ghoul-Chewer, who I was painting for the second time in my life. I stupidly killed my original model that I got back in the 90s by lopping off his hands and grafting them onto a Warhammer Fantasy Black Orc, in my attempt to make a more imposing model. This time around, other than the silly yellow face on his chest, I went with a colour scheme that felt very Snakebitey, in honour of my favourite clan.

Also included in this little batch was a Dark Elf from the 90s metal team, who in my collection is going to be used as Roxanna Darknail. I'd had a desire for a while to paint a model in quite a bright red and yellow scheme, and she was already undercoated in red. So picking this model made sense.

If you don't count my test Storm Vermin from a few years ago, the next model was my first Skaven player in Headsplitter. I highlighted his skin before washing, which I think was a mistake as he went quite dark afterwards. The highlights are still visible, and I didn't want to paint them all again, so sod it.

Part way through painting these, I got a delivery in the form of a few new paints from TTCombat, which I was trying for the first time. At this point, I've used them all except the green, and they seem pretty good so far.

After painting the star players, I sighed and accepted that it was about time I finished the full Skaven team, which I'd not touched since mid 2017. Poor rats had been abandoned all this time.

Against my better judgment, I continued the scheme I originally came up with. Though I am loathed to paint yellow over a dark undercoat, I really did need a team to have at least some of this colour on them. And they are the Undercity Cheese Thieves after all. It's likely that they would have that colour on the brain.

Part way through painting, I needed to touch up some of the skin I'd painted years ago. However, I simply couldn't find the pink paint I'd used as a base coat. I have absolutely no idea what happened to it. Maybe it dried up, but I don't remember ever throwing it away. Odd.

I had to mix a kind-of similar colour out of a different pink and a pale grey. Meh, it works. Ish.

I've not tried as hard with these models as I have on some other models recently, and got through them in a bit of a rush. But they are adequate for my own low standards.

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Here are the finished results of my recent Blood Bowl painting spree.

When I was a wee young lad, one of my friends had a board game called Escape From Atlantis, which I only got to play with him once. At weird, random times throughout my life, vague memories of this game have popped into my head just to say hello.

Last year, I saw that the game had been reprinted under the name Survive The Island, and I clearly must have mentioned this to some family members, as I ended up receiving it as a gift over the Christmas period.

Though eager to get stuck in, I first needed to give the game a little TLC to get it ready for the tabletop.

Firstly, like I've started to do with many of my other games, I painted some thinned PVA glue around the edges of the thick card pieces, to seal them and hopefully prevent potential minor damage in the future.

Secondly, though the wooden meeples all had their points values engraved on their undersides, I thought these numbers were a little hard to see. So to remedy this a little, I dribbled in some thinned down black and white paint to make the numbers pop a little more.

Lastly, one of the meeples had a small section that was spearing off, so I glued it and held it in place with a clothes peg until it was fully set.

We had a full five players for the game's maiden outing.

I had an absolute stinker of an early game, with my little dudes getting dunked into the water straight away. One of my five point guys swam all the way to one of the islands only to get chomped right before he made landfall.
I wasn't even able to save anyone until my penultimate turn, when I got 3 of my little orange meeples back to land to somehow grab second place with 10 points.

But there was no stopping the yellows, who were clear in the lead with 15. I can't remember who got what, but the other 3 players all had either 6 or 7 points, so were very close.

It's a fun little game and easy to learn, but because of its simplicity and how competitive it is, I'm not sure how much play it will get in our little group, as we tend to lean towards more co-operative experiences.

I really needed a darker silver, so I wasn't quite ready to give up on that Humbrol paint just yet. I pulled the top off with some pliers, and dispensed it into an empty pot.

Not a great deal came out of it, but after giving it a damn good mix and shake, it turned out to be quite a good paint, probably the best of the four Humbrol paints I bought, at least.
It does however seem to be quite a "weak" paint, in that if I picked up the model by any parts that had that paint on it, the paint would rub off quite easily.

I ended up using it quite a lot on Ramtut, and on some bits of the Evil Sunz. It's not as dark as I'd like, but it's better than the other bright silvers at my disposal.

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Epic Orks aren't the only things I've been painting recently. For some weird reason, even though the game isn't on our radar at all, I decided to paint a couple of random Blood Bowl star players.