Last night I finally got started on painting my first Trollbloods (or Trolls, to be more precise). I am painting up the rest of a friend's Trollbloods army that I am allowed to use for the OETC. In early summer we decided that I am going to play Trollbloods at the OETC because Botond is playing Cygnar, but while I immediately loved Trollbloods, I didn't have a realistic time frame to get two fully painted 50pts lists for the OETC. Luckily, Sven lets me play his army at the OETC and I help him paint it in return, so it's a win-win situation for both of us.
I am also very grateful that he allows me to paint his army because doing so I can develop inspiration for my own Trollbloods army later. I never do test models and start painting right away, so by having this part of the process happen on Sven's models I will hopefully have an accurate idea once I get started on my own models.
Now that Wargames Con in Austin is over, it's time to get focused on the Trollbloods for OETC.
I decided to get started with the Trolls because they have a large surface that allows to paint rather quickly. Sven had already basecoated the models and dipped them in some sort of quick shade (probably Army Painter). You can see on the models/Fennblades in the background of the top photograph how they looked before I got started on them.
The first thing I noticed was that I don't like quick shade. It gives the miniatures a smeary/oily look that doesn't exactly fit Trollbloods. Plus you have to be really careful to let *everything* drop off or you'll get spots covering parts of your model with the eventual loss in detail.
Sven already painted large parts of his army with Rök almost fully done, so I used Rök as a point of reference for my activities:
On Rök I highlighted the skin, drybrushed his hair, painted the trinkets and skulls in Rök's beard, and painted his eyes yellow. Sven has some of his Trollbloods painted with yellow eyes and some with red eyes, so I wasn't exactly sure which route to go. After a little while (I even thought about calling him first) I decided to play offence and painted them yellow because the blue-yellow contrast are one of the two strongest color contrasts for the human visual system and we all want a rather fierce Troll, right?
After that I did the EBDT as he was rather easy to do. I only had to highlight his skin, paint his teeth and eyes, his toe- and fingernails, plus the stones he is leaping over:
Finally I had to do Mulg and he is almost as easy as the EBDT since drybrushing helps a lot with Mulgs delicate runes.
I was kinda worrying about how to paint Mulg's club adequately, but once again starting with a dark brown, using a black wash on it, and then slap on lighter layers of brown again did the trick. I felt like a club in a light yellow/sand color or a light/dark green doesn't leave a realistic impression as the club doesn't look like Mulg just made it from a fresh tree prior to battle, but like it has seen many battles already.
Painting Mulg is a special moment as it is a very impressive model. While you paint it, you get a close understanding why his enemies run away screaming in terror once he shows up on the battle field. ^^
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