Earthborn Dire Troll

The latest and largest addition to my Trollbloods force, the Earthborn Dire Troll. It took me 3 days of filing, gluing, green stuff and painting to get it to this point. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera on hand when I was putting it together last weekend or I would have taken step-by-step shots.

In these pictures you can see the right arm blocks most of the surface of his stomach, groin and right leg. I actually painted the right leg and arm before assembling the torso to the hips. There was a particularly large gap in the mold on its back (~4mm wide) which I had to remodel with green stuff. My work is a bit clumsy, but you can't really tell from these shots. I also ended up closing the gap between his right leg and hips, and his head and neck. The teeth were super easy to paint, and I still haven't painted the eyes.

I was considering the purchase of a Dire Troll Mauler, but after the work I put into the Earthborn Dire Troll I am going to wait for a month or two before taking on another big project. Regardless, I am really happy with the results of my first Warbeast and 50mm project.

New Year, New Paints, New Project

My reentry into Warmachine and first exposure to Hordes started this week with a box of Trollkin Fennblades. Not the wisest choice for army genesis, considering the unit is basically unplayable against the prefabricated starter sets, but the models look good and I am avoiding the Trollblood starter box until the plastic miniatures are released. It's not that I'm averse to working with metal miniatures, I just prefer plastic.

Emily gave me an awesome paint box, paints and paintbrushes for Christmas, so I was eager to crack them open and get started yesterday. Unfortunately, the Fennblade model I chose to paint had a ton of mold lines; about 30 minutes of scraping and filing later I was ready to base it. I don’t normally get too fancy with bases, but I really wanted this Fennblade standing with one foot up on a rock. I removed the plastic bar connecting the model's feet and created a more dynamic pose.

I primed black and was ready to go. The defining articles of Trollblood equipment are the sash and loincloth, traditionally painted with a pattern unique to your army. Having drooled jealously over the tartan designs on many Trollblood armies, I decided to try my hand at a simple tartan design which I think came out rather well.

This model is about 90% done. I'm going to repaint and possibly add some sculpting to the leg to have him "going commando". I've also got to highlight the dark green and red in the sash. The tartan design was simple: a base layer of dark green ("Green Meadow"); a broad cross pattern of dark red ("Brick Red") with brighter red ("Napthol Crimson") square intersections; lastly, thin yellow ("Lemon Custard") lines breaking the horizontal pattern.

Green Stuff I

"Green stuff" is awesome and I don't always have the patience for it. In an effort to wind down after a long day, I spent some time modifying the musician for my Empire State Troops, adding straps for his unwieldy drum. I used 5 small pieces; 1 long strap, 2 shorter straps that appear to cross underneath the main strap, and 2 small balls pressed flat where the strap joins the drum, to give the appearance of pins.

I flattened the straps and squared the edges with a pair of coffee stirrers, and trimmed excess with a scalpel. The process took about 20 minutes.

I also spent some downtime drooling at the new releases for Hordes and Warmachine. Anyone interested in picking up a starter box and learning the game with me? I remember owning the original Cygnar starter set in '04 or '05, but I ended up selling it, fully painted, for about 75$; never did get to play. Technically, Warmachine and Hordes are 30mm games and outside the purview of this blog. /lol

Painting Again

With the second session of the new Pathfinder game past, I decided it was time to paint some of the miniatures picked out by players to represent their characters. These two minis have been in my collection, primed black and wanting, for about eight years now. The first was this elfish ranger:

I’m not happy with his right hand, which has been remodeled several times and eventually pinned after breaking at the hilt. The cloak also has some strange coloration due to a repainting; I glued my finger to it while adding the sand base, and subsequently ripped off parts of the base coat.

The necromancer has been half finished since the day I got it. I actually painted over some red in favor of blue-complementing brown. The runes on the scroll are clumsily painted on (this smaller resolution version of the image handily conceals my frequent erasing with white paint).

As an aside, I learned how to take pictures of miniatures with my 50mm lens. The f-stop was at 1.8 for the pictures in the previous post, which in poor light at macro distances produces an extremely narrow focus. With the f-stop increased to 5.0, near the lens’s maximum of 5.6, there is a deeper field of focus. I am pleased with the results. The miniatures are a little shiny as the matte varnish was still wet when the pictures were taken.

Hut-date!

Here's my last update of 2009. The huts will get some more detail with bits, but they'll be primed and painted soon. My desk is a mess.



Here are two small aquarium plants from the pet store that I'm working on; they chop up in to a good amount of bits for jungle foilage.

Terrain: Huts

Let me show you what I've been working on. (I decided this post was better without the How-To banter. The photos explain things pretty well).

Here's what I imagine my Lizardmen's village looks like at sunset:

No wait...



Here is a peak at how I'm finishing up the huts. More to come...

Bases for an Empire

I chose Empire because I wanted to field a bunch of goofy looking peasants. My battalion arrived on Thursday, a full two weeks after the first skinks stole onto the scene and I cracked it open today for the first time — only to be reminded that I had not settled on a way to base them. I flip-flopped on standard dirt-and-grass versus cobblestone (some part of me wants to keep the bases the same across all models and the idea of horses on cobblestone is silly to me) and finally settled on the latter.

To create the stones, I used a pair of scissors to cut small, irregularly shaped circles out of a cereal box (Total, if you must know) and glued them onto the 20mm base. The cracks are filled with standard Citadel flocking sand. I was a little worried about the bond between the base and the compressed cardboard, and the cardboard and the model, but it seemed sturdy even before a coat of primer.