I’m off to Europe first thing tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, heading to Vienna to join a group riding all the way to Nantes, France. That’s roughly 2200-2300km over 44 days on the road; we leave Vienna on May 30th and arrive in Nantes on July 14th, Bastille Day! I’ve got a few days in France and then I fly out of Paris on July 20th back to Canada.

I might make a couple of short posts here from Europe, but please don’t count on it! On the other hand, I am going to be trying to update my personal blog semi-regularly from the road, as wi-fi and spare time allows.

Someone elsewhere on the web asked me how much planning and design work I do for projects like the just-completed Bloodbowl Temple/Scoreboard; the answer is “really, not a lot“, but I will visualize things in head and try to work project details out mentally long before committing pencil to paper or knife to foam.

For the BB temple, aside from wanting to keep the footprint about the same as the previous one, the major critical dimensions are the main staircase which also displays the two BB scatter diagrams the game needs. I knew that if I got that main component set up properly the rest was much less exact and could be done largely on the fly.

Above are the two scrap sheets of paper I used for sketching and planning. The right-hand one was first and has a top-down view and a rough perspective sketch. The left-hand one I actually used a ruler to lay out the main steps/scatter diagrams full size (the tiles are 15mm x 15mm), then roughed in the rest of the temple structure around it.

The build was more or less a matter of going through my bits of scrap styrofoam insulation board and fitting pieces to the left-hand plan, then eyeballing the dimensions of the three parts of the upper level once the base layer of 25mm thick styrofoam was in place. I measured the three indicator alcoves, but eyeballed just about everything else.

More precise architecture would be less forgiving, but this style of temple can withstand quite a lot of sloppy building and still look just fine in the end! Confession time: there are a number of places on this build where I shaved pieces of foam off after it was all glued together, disguised things with putty, or even added extra foam back after realizing I’d misjudged something.

After I’m home from Europe in July I’m going to start in on new BB dugouts and tracking scenery (Turns & Rerolls per team) to match the new temple scoreboard.

Back in July, and please do check out my main blog for news of the bike trip!

The Blood Bowl scoreboard temple now has paint on it and is largely finished except for some gloss varnish over the two pools for a water look and some flock on the base and around the temple here and there.

The three indicator cubes are basecoated and will get drybrushing and colour paint tomorrow.

Almost there!

I posted way back in early December about the Blood Bowl pitch and scenery I was working on, and it’s been in use regularly in the months since, but in all that time I’ve never managed to get a photo of it in action!

Here we go, finally.

At centre is the scoreboard, which also has a scatter diagram engraved in the tiles of the courtyard area. There should be magnetic sheet number panels up on the stone backdrop to show the score, but I left them at home (derp) so the d6 is showing the 1-0 score at present.

Either side of the scoreboard structure is each team’s dugout and tracking area – three tracks for First Half Turn, Second Half Turn and Re-Rolls, and the usual three dugout spaces behind for Reserves, KO’d and Casualties.

The whole Blood Bowl setup is at that mildly irritating “80% done and usable but not really finished” stage; the fabric pitch itself needs a couple of passes of green and brown spraypaint to get a bit of a grassier look going on, then masking and spraying for the white pitch lines. I also want to do a Lizardman team logo at the centre of the pitch, and possibly team name in the endzones, so that’s more masking and spraying.

The pitch-side pieces need at least one more coat of drybrushing, then flocking, vines and various greenery to complete the desired jungle temple look.

I’m actually starting to build a whole new scoreboard structure, the same footprint but quite a different design that will, among other things, incorporate a Weather indicator as well as the score and scatter markers. Photos of that later this week, probably.