Basecoating Trollbloods

Tonight I started painting up Sven's Fennblades and did a lot of thinking on how to basecoat Trollbloods.

Disclaimer: I am still thinking with the vocabulary of the old GW painting line, so please bear with me and look for equivalents. I myself will paint my upcoming Trollbloods army with Army Painter paint.

At the very top you can see Greygore Boomhowler & Co. that I painted up for my Warmachine/Cygnar army. They are painted in the classic style with blue skin, brown leather, bronze armor, and green cloth. I started by spraying on a bacl undercoated and worked my way up from there. It took me dozens of hours to paint them with all the various layers.

Before I started to work on Sven's Trollbloods I realized something and saw this confirmed tonight: ideally, you are getting two basecoat colored sprays from Army Painter: a blue one for Trolls showing a lot of skin (e.g. the EBDT) and a brown one for the infantry models as they are mostly covered in leather and armor.

So as I was painting up the Feenblades tonight, I spent a lot of time just painting on a dark brown basecoat for anything armor or leather later because Sven basecoated them all in something very close to Hawk Turquoise:

(the little guy on the top right serves as the reference model as it was painted by Sven)

With every new army project I wanna boost my painting skills, but I also try to become more efficient. Getting to different types of colored primer indeed would make every more efficient. The reason why I am hesitant to do this is because I don't want to end up with a full bar of different primer spray cans plus there is an extra cost to have it, of course.

Thinking about all this I realized there is a smart yet good looking way to be both efficient and have a great looking army: start with a green basecoat on everything.

1. For the skin, you simply start to work your way up from towards a Hawk Turquoise and Ice Blue tone.
2. For armor, you go the Goblin Green/Scorpion Green route.

I think this setup will be both very efficient as you can quickly build up the layers yet have a distinctive look/difference between skin and armor. Furthermore it will be sort of permissive if you slip with the brush and paint something you didn't intend to paint with your current color. If you are lucky, it will be hardly seen, if you're unlucky, it will be very easy to fix by painting over.

I like the idea so much that I will violate my rule of never doing a test model and try it on Madrak Ironhide from the starterbox first. If I like what I see, I will apply it to my entire Trollbloods army. And I will also strip Boomhowler & Co. and repaint them in my new painting scheme. Their paint job got already chipped in numerous places because of the rough air travel they had to endure so I may as well repaint them again.