#BloodBowl #ArmiesOnParade Mega bowl or Death Bowl pitch - TO DONE!

Afternoon #WarHamFam and #WarhammerCommunity I've been working on my #ArmiesOnParade2023 board. This year is all about showcasing 4 of my Blood Bowl teams. The 'best of the rest' category is always quite small and I wanted to showcase it doesn't have to be 40k or 30k [and not a cynical attempt to reduce the odds]. Mega bowl is way of playing Blood Bowl  with 4 teams and I wanted a 7's pitch so that it would fit in a 2'x2' square. However, 7's pitches are 21 spaces long and you may note this is one square short... Nevermind, it's not like I'm going to limit it to seven players on the pitch either. Anyway, I created the grid, the 3x3 corners will be space for reserves and the inner square is the 'no-man's' land that teams start outside of.

Next up - tile spacers to create tangible squares. Superglued in place, although the glue was a little temperamental sometimes. It was quite the challenge to make sure the crosses were all aligned neatly while 'floating' on this cushion of superglue. Using a couple of scalpels to press it in place was the easiest way to do it. 

The whole thing got a PVA and sand covering, then primed with Halfords Red Oxide car primer, then I think matt black car spray. Lots of Burnt Umber brown, but the bottom quarter will be my Nurgle tar pit, so I mixed talcum powder with PVA to create an effect similar to my Gloss Black 3d Texture paint. The tile spacers were still a little too plasticky, so I added some Valejo Red Oxid texture paste on all of them. 

I started mixing in some Latte [cream] art acrylic into the Burnt Umber for highlights in each player square.

And yet more highlights, creating a much paler board than I had expected.

I added a bit of shading around each tile spacer and then picked each one out in white so they're clearly defined.

I then added the rest of the pitch markings, so now we can begin to understand the layout a bit more. Now, we know where Nurgle is going, but the Humans and Halflings are on grass, while the Orcs are barren earth, which is what we currently have. So who else goes where?

This is a Photoshop mock-up as I had always envisaged the grass splitting the pitch.

Halflings opposite the Humans.

But I suddenly wondered if dividing it diagonally might make more sense.

With 'good' on one side and bad encroaching from the other.

So I used the mock-ups to poll on a Blood Bowl group and they all suggested splitting the pitch was the better option. I'm not sure why but this is where we got to with the flocking, some small flowers in the Halfling reserve area [I swapped the human halfling sides] and gloss varnished the tar pit. The grass was much less green than my renderings but other than that it came out OK.

So, next was picking out the endzones, which was pretty straight forward and fun to do.

And lastly the BB double skull logo in the centre. In 7's 2 balls fit in 2 of the 4 centre squares [so actually if it had have been 21x21 squares it wouldn't have worked]. So the skull is a nice touch to help show where that is and harks back to the Astrogranite™ original. I printed an outline stencil, cut it out and stippled white. The a second stencil for the black outline, which I then tidied up freehand.

So that pretty much TO DONE! and as it was done quite a few months back now it actually gets the last GREAT Big RUSTY Stamp of Approval. 

So, as far as I'm concerned my AoP is now ready. The only thing I feel I could add is a backdrop, but I'm not sure I have the wherewithal at the moment to fit that in alongside my other hobby projects. We'll see after #DreadTober as our in-store parade is earmarked for 18th November...