Tuesday 2 September 2014

Retinue Table; A troll


Hi all; a bit of a hiatus on the blog over the past few weeks (and a short post today), as I have been relaxing on holiday in Crete and obviously had little desire or opportunity to do anything hobby related. In fact I barely had access to the internet for the fortnight which meant I got to spend much more uninterrupted time with my wife and kids; which was a struggle at first! My return has left me with a lot of blogs to read and catch up on and I've looked at my pile of unpainted miniatures in a refreshed light only to find it even more daunting.... However I'm up for the challenge even though time will be precious again with the school term starting today (a tedious Inset day).

So just prior to my holiday I did manage to paint this old troll for my retinue table challenge (and for my scenario at the BOYL weekend). I've painted the skin in my usual pale pastelle pallette but wanted to set myself a challenge for the fur. I completed some research on the internet into different animal furs and decided to go for a tiger pattern:


The first thing I learnt was that the sides of the fur are very pale, almost up to white and the second thing I struggled with was the painting of the black line pattern accurately onto a sculpt that is heavily textured - I ended up using a precise dilution of paint that flowed well without running down the model.

 I've also gone for a swampy base by sanding the texture off of the 40mm base to make it smooth; raising the model up onto several layers of cork; created bubbles by adding some cut in half balls of silicone gel that you find in small packets with your newly purchased trainers and then applying a range of green paints followed finally by several coats of gloss varnish over the swamp areas.

The vegetation base (and on top of the rock he is holding) is my usual technique that I will show a step by step of in a future post. Hope you like it!

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