Even more so than most star players, Gretchen is a player I’ll almost certainly never actually use in a game. Not only are star players vanishingly rare in Blood Bowl (except for certain stunty teams or strange team builds that minimise team value specifically to allow enough inducement cash to hire them), but Gretchen seems on paper like a fairly poor player, being designed to annoy the hell out of the ball carrier (a job she excels at with the ability to easily dodge into any cage, plus sidestep and shadowing to) but lacking block so cannot reliably stay standing, and an expensive one to boot. So this is pretty much exclusively a modelling project and is a close copy of a conversion I saw posted online a couple of years ago. I would credit the original creator and link to their work, but I’m afraid I have forgotten who did this and even what platform I saw it on.
Suffice to say, they had the cool idea to blend parts from the banshee kit with normal wight blitzers to make the wraiths for their Necromantic team. I thought it was a beautifully simple combination and bought the kits more or less on the spot. This month, I dug them out to make my own wraith for Yaktribes “I believe I can fly” competition, this being the only model on my build and paint backlog that is close to flying.
It took some experimentation to work out which banshee base to use and which way to point the wight torso, but I settled on this pose that has some really nice movement. Blending the parts was a matter of shaping the banshees lower robes to fit into the wight torso, cutting down the banshee cloak and gluing the back of the wight to it, then resculpting the joins as best as I could. I used clay shapers to get this putty as smooth as possible and covered it with a layer of plastic solution (made by mixing sprue shavings with liquid polycement).
The only other conversion work was giving Gretchen some hair which I did with the top knot from a Warcry kit and a few more rolled individually from green stuff.
I painted Gretchen to match the rest of the Hel Fenn Headstones. This is the first figure I’ve painted for the team myself as the rest was commission painted, and the difference definitely shows, particularly in the vast expanse of the eerie glowing cloak. My attempt is much rougher and the layers are all too visible in places.
