How to make shoulder pads for blood bowl players. Part I

Here is another small tutorial, this time about how to make shoulder pads with Green Stuff or other type of modelling putty.

There are a lot of ways to make shoulder pads a lot of possible shapes. This tutorial only shows 3 ways that are rather similar I added "Part I" to the title of the entry in case in the future I decided to make another one explaining other ways to make them and other shapes. In the tutorial I show the images first and below them their explanation, I hope is comprehensible.

Chaos Shoulder Pads

Chaos warriors usually have a strong armour with some big shoulder pads. We are going to begin putting some putty in the shoulder of a miniature (1). We shape the putty with our fingers giving it a rough shape of we want (2), as it seems a little to big we cut some of the putty with a hobby knife (3). Now using a sculpting tool we smooth the surface and give it a more defined shape (4). Then we press the flat and straight part of the sculpting tool near the head to make a small border (5).

To make the shoulder pad a little more chaos like we are going to add to horns in it. With something pointy like a pen with no ink left in it we made two round holes in the shoulder pad (1). Using the sculpting tool we joint together the two holes and also press the putty around the holes in the spirit to simulate that the growth of the horns have torn up the shoulder pad (2). Then we made two putty sausages with one pointy end and place them in the holes (3). To finish we reshape the border around the holes (4). The shoulder pad is finished, but...

personally I didn't like the shape, it was too straight so I added a little Green Stuff that I have left to the end of the shoulder pad (1) I joined the GS to the rest of the shoulder pad without destroying to much the previous work (2) and I shaped so the shoulder pad had a more curved shape (3). Now the shoulder pad is finished.

Human Blitzer Shoulder Pads

The process is more or less the same. I wanted to give my human blitzers a better protected look so their shoulder pads are quite big also. We start by putting some putty in one shoulder and giving a rough shape with our fingers (first row of pictures). We cut the excess of putty and continue shaping them this time with a sculpting tool. Later we push some of the putty from the borders to the center of the shoulder pad, making at the same time a border all around the shoulder pad (second row of pictures). We finish shaping the shoulder pad and we add some detail to "join" the shoulder pad to the frontal armour. The next picture show how I took out the shoulder pad, not because it wasn't a good result, but because the player wasn't a blitzer was a lineman and their shoulders are different as I show in the next section.

Human Linemen Shoulder Pads

Well this shoulder pad is the more simpler than the ones before and the steps for doing it are the same as for the blitzer shoulder pads. You can see that is a smaller shoulder pad and with a more simple shape, like a segment of a sphere cut with two straight cuts.

As you can see it is quite easy to make different shoulder pads, the simpler shapes are more easy to reproduce in other miniatures. As I said in the introduction I've made other types of shoulder pads with other shapes, for example, the elfs ones were flat and less bulky. In the future maybe I made a part II of this tutorial explain how to make them.

I hope you like this tutorial!