Subbuteo re-paints

You can imagine my delight, as a child of the 70's, when I saw that Subbuteo had been relaunched. The  new set contains rubber players that remove the old Subbuteo annoyance of players with chunky ankles caused by over  enthusiastic super gluing following a snapped ankle incident.

 

I quickly snapped up a set, with the aim of setting it up at school as some sort of behaviour incentive for my difficult, but football mad, class of boys. Together with some of the lads, I built a Subbuteo 'arena', pictures of which will appear in a later blog.

 

As with classic Subbuteo, you can buy specific teams, however I was really disappointed to see that the Liverpool team's kit was inaccurate! With this in mind, and with apologies to Subbuteo purists, I bought an old 80s plastic Liverpool team with the aim to paint it up in the current kit.

The Picture above shows the whole team pre-painting. The existing paint job on the team was at best faded and at worst, bloody shoddy. The goalie was just a generic keeper that bore no resemblance at all to the Liverpool keepers kit of the day.The picture below shows how worn the figures were.

 

 

The first stage was to prepare the players for painting - this involved filing off mould lines and imperfections, and in the case of the figures that will represent Jonjo Shelvey and Martin Skrtel, the hair line was carefully filed away to leave the skull looking suitably bald.

 The next stage was to paint the skintone. Classic Subbuteo teams were either all white or all black (although they did mix it up in the 1990's). So Glen Johnson and Raheem Sterling were dutifully painted with Citadel Dark Flesh, whilst the rest were treated to Vallejo pale skin washed over with Old Citadel Ogryn flesh wash.

Once dried I painted over the entire kit with Vallejo Red. I painted some of the players in short sleeves and some in either long sleeves, or with 'under armour' shirts on. The result of which can be seen above.

Next came the keeper, having painted the skin, I then used Old Citadel Goblin Green to make Pepe's home kit. Hands were then painted Citadel Skull White, as the Classic Subbuteo keepers were all bare handed.

 

The next step will be to add the details such as badges, sponsors and numbers. Next is the decision to either just repaint the books black, or research the specific colour required by each player in  the current first team.