Hobby: Painting a Storm Troll Pt.1
Another long overdue painting project: a Storm Troll for my Trollblood army. Grab your brushes and follow along.
I start it off, as always, with the metals.For the chains, leggings, and metal plates on his waist, I begin with a nice rusty Bloodstone. This is a Formula P3 color, as are most of the ones I’ll be using. For the ridge down his back I decided to go with nice conductive (although a bit oxidized) copper. This part of the beast seems like it’s supposed to be a natural growth, but if it’s supposed to be conductive, I figured it should be metal all the same. The slag trolls seem to be able to grow metal protrusions at any rate.
The Ridge is drybrushed with Beaten Copper, while the armor is drybrushed with Radiant Platinum.
Then both areas are washed with P3 armor wash. I’m trying this out in place of my usual custom armor wash mixed from multiple GW washes. Its doing ok so far. It doesn’t apply as evenly but rather seems better at finding the cracks and settling in.
On to the skin now. It gets a basecoat of Trollblood Highlight.
I start blocking out the shadows with a navy blue I mixed up from a roughly 1:1 mix of Umbral Umber and Exile Blue.
Once I have all the shadows where I want them I blend them in to the Trollblood Highlight basecoat with the help of some Matisse Drying Retarder.
Before adding the highlights I decide to do some other areas of skin to see how the colors interact. I have over half a dozen pots of flesh tones I’ve mixed for Arena Rex minis I’ve painted. Their unusual tones often come in handy for my trolls as well.
The Grayish purple on the left was used for the elbows, knuckles, palms, and lips. I have no idea what I mixed it from… or when I mixed it for that matter. It kinda looks like Beast Hide with some Beaten Purple and Umbral Umber mixed in. The pot on the right was used for the the interior of the mouth. I’m guessing Khardic Flesh also with some Umbral Umber. Yeah that sounds about right.
As you’ve probably already noticed, I’m skipping the blue lightning route in order to try more of a purple. I add some Menoth White and Frostbite to a desaturated purple I keep around in a pre-mixed pot, and begin creating a halo effect around the runes. This turned out to be a bit easier than I expected. There was never really a need to blend it in the usual way. By keeping the paint thinned with a bit of water and a teensy bit of retarder I was able to glaze on the purple in thin layers that I increase in number the closer they got to the runes in the center. Keeping the paint the right consistency is the tricky part here. To thick and you lose the translucency. Too thin and it’s not really workable. You’ll also want to go in around the outer edges of the glows with a clean brush while they are still wet and actually pick up some of the paint to help reinforce the blended look.
And here’s that purple I just mentioned. It’s mixed from Umbral Umber and Beaten Purple. I use for all sorts of things as you’ll probably know if you read a lot of these articles.
Next all the Runes themselves are picked out with a pale mix of Frostbite and Menoth White Highlight with just the tiniest bit of that desaturated purple added.
A little bit of subtle shading is added to these runes by blending just a bit more of that same purple in with them. I also chose to increase the range of the glow since the addition of the pale purple seemed to diminish it some.
While I went with a purple you can use basically this same glow technique for whichever color you want. Blues, purples, and greens are the easiest. Yellows are definitely the hardest with reds and oranges somewhere in the middle. There is a little bit more on glows in this article and this article.
We will wrap this guy up in part 2 coming up soon!
