How to convert a free company man into a Human Blood Bowl Thrower Part (I)

I made this tutorial because a member of one of the forums that I usually visit ask me to.

The request was quite specific, he wanted me to explain how would I do the armour plates and other armour parts of the human thrower that appears in the wallpapers of the game Blood Bowl II. I only had a couple of shoots so I done the best I could with the little information at my disposition.

Pictures obtained from the Blood Bowl game website

Even if I only had to explain how to make the armour plates I decided to try to make a miniature with the stand shown in the left part of the picture above, well a mirror image of it. You can see the result of this tutorial in the picture below (the colour scheme is the one of our Human BB team).

This first part of the tutorial explains how I made the legs, and the body armour.
In the second part, I will show how to make the rest of the armour, the muscles of the arms and the helmet.


Introduction
In this tutorial I used a mix of two epoxy putties: Green stuff and A+B white modelling putty.

To work with the putty I use sculpting tools, a hobby knife, rubber shapers and my fingers. If you are working with Green Stuff remember to wet the tools and your fingers.


Planning & bits preparation

I have used the following bits:
- Body and legs from the WFB Free Company box of The Empire range miniatures.
- Arms for the two handed sword from the WFB Free Company box of The Empire range miniatures.
- Head with hood from the WFB Bretonnian Peasant Bowmen.
- A copy of my own designed Blood Bowl ball.

Once the bits are chosen is a good idea to put them together to have an idea of how the model will look.

Changing the trousers
I wanted the model to have shorts so I added some putty to the upper part of the legs and sculpt some lines in it with a sculpting tool.

Adding the body armour
According to the pictures from the Blood Bowl II game I think that the model has armour all around its body. To make it we push a ball of putty in the chest and flatten it and another one in the back and do the same. We push the putty trying to merge both balls at the sides of the body. If there isn't enough putty we add more to fill the gaps.

Next we make a putty sausage and place it around the model waist. We cut the excess and flatten it with a sculpting tool to make the lower border of the body armour.

Making the knee-pads
The steps above are quite simple and I didn't go into too much detail, I think this part is more interest so I'm going to explain it a little better (I hope :-S).

First we need to place two putty balls of roughly the same size in both knees. I usually make a putty sausage and cut it in two equal parts in order to have more or less the same quantity of putty. I'll explain how to make the left one. The process for both is the same but I use the right one as trial and error.

We start by flattening the putty ball. Then we press the flat part of the sculpting tool at aproximately 1/4 of the vertical leng and then at 3/4, pushing a little bit the putty to the center. After that with the round part we continue to push the putty to the center.

Next we are going to make the upper and lower pointy edges. With the flat part of the sculpting tool we flatten the upper part of the putty ball first from the left then from the right. Then we push the putty of the left part with the flat part of the sculpting tool down and after the putty of the right part. We do the same thing in the lower edge and then we improve the shape using the flat and curved parts of the sculpting tool.

The basic shape of the knee-pad is done, now we need to improve the right and left ends. The end that is in the exterior is going to have a small disk. With the sharp part of a sculpting tool or a hobby knife we cut the putty at that end and after that we add a small putty ball and flatten it. To the interior end we only have to check the shape and cut a little bit of the putty in case it is necessary.

In the picture below you can see the knee-pads finished.

Adding the armour plates in the upper part of the legs
We make two roughly equal putty balls and place them in the upper part of the legs. Then we flatten them with the sculpting tool and start shaping the putty, pushing part of the putty until we have the basic shape we wanted. Next we gave to it some curvature with the curved part of the sculpting tool and the conic handle of the sculpting tool.

I like the plates as they were but they weren't too similar to the ones that the BBII thrower has, so I tried to modified them a little more. Now that we have the shape we mark two lines with the sharp edge of the sculpting tool. We also push the sculpting tool point in the upper part of the exterior side. Next with a pin we mark the position for the rivets and make the rivets cutting small slices of a slim putty sausage and giving them a ball shape with our fingers. We place the rivets in their places and push them a little bit to merge them with the rest of the putty.

We do the same in the other leg.

Now the miniatures looks like the one in the pictures below.

Adding the final details to the legs
To finish with the legs we need do a few more things.
First, cover the gap in the rear part of the legs. We place a slim putty sausage and push it into the gap, then we cut out the excess.

We also have to add a strap to the knee-pads. We made some putty sausages, place them in place, flatten them, shape them a little with and cut the excess.

Last, we have to make the player shocks. We made more putty sausages, place them in place and now we try to merge its lower edge to the leg so there is a small edge to limit what is the shock and what is the bare leg.

In the picture below you can see how the thrower looks like after all this steps.

And below how it looks like with the arms.

For now this is all, in the next part I'll show you how to finish the conversion.

Hope you like it!