Transcript
That’s right, It’s February and I’m talking about Christmas. And in a brief moment of secretive foreshadowing, there’s gonna be another Christmas video in the middle of summer, and you’re gonna thank me for it.
So, recently it was Christmas and I got a package in the mail from my daughter. And inside was one of the coolest gifts I’ve ever received. A brand new box of Games Workshop trolls – I mean troggoths.
I would dig having the job tasked with coming up with copyright enforceable names, that seems pretty fun, right? But we all know these are trolls.
Anyway, the trolls are not the cool part of the gift. I mean, they’re awesome sculpts, and when I opened the package I was like ooh! More trolls! Cause I already have this box in the Pile of Opportunity. But there was a note in the box, and my daughter said, in the note – and I’m paraphrasing here – Merry Christmas, Dad. THIS is a gift exchange. I sent you these trolls to paint for me and you send me a set of minis that I’ll paint for you.
Coolest gift ever.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we see everything as possible content like a good YouTuber.
I did ask my daughter if it was cool that I make a video about her Christmas gift and she was fine with that. C’mon, I’m not a total social media monster. Jeez.
Also, let me mention a couple new things – one, this backdrop. I just wanted to get some contrast between my skin tone and the skin tone wall back there. It’s just a chunk of printed cloth, so if this works okay, I’ll be able to toss up different backgrounds up now and then, and that sounds like fun for me.
And, two, I’d like to thank my patrons. I’m sure they’re wondering why it’s taken so long for me mention them, but as I’ve pointed out in the past I produce these videos weeks in advance – most of the time – so that’s why. Anyway, every one of you dear viewers is much appreciated and I thank my patrons for hitting that tip jar, that is very much appreciated as well.
So onto these trolls and this week’s painting project. Another cool thing my daughter was okay with was the fact that I had already built and primed my box of trolls, so I didn’t have to do any assembly or prep for this particular project, which is always nice, right?
And as a further bonus, we’re tacking on another couple, small, FFTs onto this video. I’ve never made “water bases” and I’ve got a couple different products I’ve never used and today’s the day to use some of them. A while back I sent this STL file to a buddy of mine who’d just gotten a 3d printer and asked if he’d print up a selection of various sizes. Which he did, and he sent me a bunch. Many thanks, brother, again, much appreciated!
And also – hey Eryn, it’s CryinMo!
Ah, nothing like inside jokes to alienate an audience, right? At ease! Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. I don’t know where that came from. That’s back from my old military days.
Anyway, two of these trolls are set up on these relief bases, so we’ll see what kinda trouble I can make for myself towards the end of this project.
Oh yeah, here’s the set I sent my kiddo for her to paint. I requested two spears, two bows and of course the bow and baby dragon for the leader. I’m sure Age of Sigmar players just shaking their heads in dismay right about now.
Anyway, as I said, these guys were already primed, so I did a little white dry brush, but as per last month’s painting video, the undercoat is too bright. It’s all good, we’re gonna do the thing we do best – plow ahead, heedless of whatever cliffs may lie in our path.
I also set up a different camera angle from the last time, so we’ll see how this goes.
I kicked off the painting with those trademark bellies on these guys. Using a mix of Citadel Contrast Skeleton Horde and Apothecary white I just wanted to lay down some light shadow and tint the beer guts a bit.
For the overall look I wanted to do each troll in a different color. My daughter will use these primarily in D&D with Warhammer being a secondary option. In DnD it’s helpful to have multiple figures of the same type, race, whatever, be somewhat differentiated for tracking and targeting purposes. I also didn’t want to just copy the box art. So I went with a blue and a green and an orange for each of the trolls. I guess they’re from the Chromatic Savages tribe, stomping through the swamps of despair with their bright colors warning of their potential lethality. Lethality, lethality. Whatever that word is. They’re bright and deadly right? Kinda like those tiny frogs. After a coat of the primary colors and some haphazard blending along the edges with a wet brush, I doubled up the richness of each color with a deeper version of each shade, thinking the central spine area would be the darkest spot, along with the patches of scales on their legs and the forearm ridges. Blending the edges of the contrast colors while trying not to mess up the light colored bellies was a bit nerve wracking.
Sometimes just the way contrast paints work is a bit nerve-wracking, for me anyway. You’re always worried about moving fast because of the way they dry and their stellar ability to create coffee stains. I did find that once in a while, if I hadn’t waited too long, I could scrub up the edge of a “coffee stain” with a watered brush and some actual scrubbing. And putting contrast paints down on such large miniatures just increases this overall risk of leaving edges of applied paint to dry too long without blending. But you know, just gotta do the best you can.
I put some standard dark wood contrast colors down on the weapon hafts and then for these giant axe hammer things, I thought the chiseled rock might be something like obsidian, but I didn’t go for pure black, more of a deep gray with the anticipation of doing some hard edge highlights down the road. The first coat is too light and I eventually come back to double it up with another coat of the same Basilicanum gray.
Now I had to do a little bit of touch up on some of the areas that would be getting different colors so those areas of contrast paint wouldn’t have patches under them and I also painted up the various bones with one of my favorite Citadel paints, Ushabti Bone.
As I was doing this, I was thinking about something I needed to work on in my mini painting. I have lots of things I need to work on, technique-wise, but I have a tendency to make mental notes that are basically the equivalent of “Oh, I need to practice this, or I gotta get better at that” and then I stick those mental notes on a mental wall and never actually doing the things in question. I’m old enough to quit that stuff, I’m out of excuses. I gotta start consciously trying to address some of these things, right? I was thinking about how I need to consciously work on color scheme contrast.
For instance, this big carved stone rock thing I thought, hey, this dude is orange … let’s be honest, it looks like he crawled out of a Walmart-sized bag of Cheeto dust – he’s orange so this massive rock over his head should be a cool tone, a cool gray versus a warm gray. And the base he’s on should also lean towards the cooler side of the spectrum. I figured I’d put a bunch of greenery on that base, and eventually I do just that.
Then I threw a Skeleton Horde and gray mix over the bone bits to shade them down and then it was time to knock out the leather straps. At this point I moved away from contrast paints to standard paints and I use a lot of P3 paints, I like their consistency and finish, to me they are very similar to the Citadel paints but a little bit cheaper. But I also like the pots better too, which, I mean, they’re old school Citadel pots right?
This blob of stuff on the back of Blueberry dude’s hammer axe, I couldn’t really tell what it was supposed to be. It probably could have been like heavy moss or something but I decided to paint it up like it was metal slag.
Then keeping this idea of color contrast in mind, I thought these extra leather bindings would be red on Mr. Blueberry and Green Hornet here and blue on Cheeto-fingers.
Now Green Hornet’s off-hand weapon is all this vaguely crystalline structure stuff and for whatever reason I kept thinking of rose quartz and rose marble. So, you know, I just slapped down a coat of of this pink contrast color and then some razor sharp edge highlights to try to sell this quartz idea.
I kept thinking about what color or colors to do these loin cloths in but I eventually just, I just left them gray. I think it actually works in the end, because the trolls themselves are so bright and saturated.
I needed to get some color on the bases and of course since I want to put water down over these, the idea here is swamp. Even though … well, we’ll talk about this swamp idea and my failure to really capture that towards the end.
There’s always more details to pick out, stuff like this rope. I used the same color for the rope on Blueberry’s and Cheeto-fingers’ teeth and all their finger and toenails. I do try to keep in mind what a lot of the good mini painters always say: try to incorporate the same colors here and there to help with an overall unified look. I followed that up with Army Painter Soft Tone for some shading and then highlights’ll come later.
I use these three colors all the time to highlight up a rich red, but I know a lotta folks would say I don’t go bright enough. This is definitely one one of my mental post-it notes. But for now, this is as red as it gets. Blue highlights on this guy’s wrappings came out a lot more gray than blue and I kinda wish I’d pushed the saturation more.
I did some rough highlights on the brown leather details – if there are ever cases for working in sub-assemblies, which you know I dislike – these guys are definitely one of them. Some of this detail was just really difficult to reach and so, you know, we do what we can and we move on.
Got some dry brushing for the big stone head thing and I did a couple of shades, all the way up to white. I know this isn’t how a lotta folks do this, but I like to put washes down after I dry brush, I just like how the washes smooth a lot of the dry-bushiness texture. I mean sometimes I want that texture and then I won’t put a wash over it. I put down multiple colors of wash to try to mottle the overall color of the stone and I kept thinking I’d like to have some moss growing on this chunk of statue, so I kept that in mind for the basing stage.
Now it was time to do a bit of highlighting on the faces, again, I didn’t take this nearly far enough and that’s simply because at a certain point, I just don’t know what I’m doing. And also, I’m trying to not take a week per figure here. So just some basic highlighting over the contrast paint and I find often choosing highlight colors to go over contrast paint to be kinda difficult as well. I mean, the contrast paint does a pretty good job in some cases and it looks great, but it definitely looks to me like it does shadow and midtone, but it never does highlights. But then I look at the results and I wonder how I can blend in highlights to match how good the midtones and shadows are, texture-wise, because the contrast dries with basically a better look than I can match. But again, whatever, just moving on.
And now the pimple painting! Yup, this is a fun bit. Dotted some white back over the Voluptuous Pink and of course there are only like forty-seven missed pimples all over the place, but to be honest, I think if I’d done every single one, these guys might just look like they had the measles or something.
And then the eyes, the worst part of any miniature, for me. Only Green Hornet had a really prominent eyeball, which was nice to paint, the others were just little squinty eyes. I dropped some reddish black into the sockets and normally I just paint eyes white and call it a day, cause I’ve never been good at painting non-stupid looking eyes on miniatures, but as I went in to paint the eyeball white, I was like, hey, maybe just a highlight is enough. Just a microdot. So I added microdots to the other guys’ eyes as well and called it good.
I added a bit of black metal to the axe hammer slag and figured some rust was in order and so added some watery burnt orange for that rust stain effect.
After dry brushing the bases I went in with some various washes to color and darken everything up a bit.
Then it’s time for foliage and basing. Like I mentioned, Cheeto-fingers got the full forest treatment with all kinds of tufts and vines and leafy scatter texture stuff. Lotta glue, both wood glue and watered down PVA, typical stuff, and just more and more layers of texture. I even remembered to put some moss on that chunk of statue.
After all the basing was done I sprayed these guys with a matte coat, Vallejo mecha matte varnish to be precise, this is how I like to finish off all my minis and of course I didn’t want to spray matte on top of the coming water texture.
Now for the cool part. Or the new part anyway. I have three products in the Pile of Opportunity Basing Edition that I’ve never used. I have two part clear resin, I have UV resin and I have a couple of “still water” products. I’ve worked with regular resin in the past quite a bit but not on such a small scale, so I called up one of my oldest buddies who I worked with in the fx industry – he actually never left it, he’s worked for Disney and Laika and all kinds of places – he’s one of those guys who builds an entire engine for a model tank even though the engine is behind miniature grating or engine doors and will never be seen by anyone else. Anyway, I asked him if I should bother with the two part resin and he felt the UV resin would be my best bet. He also told me I should probably do some tests. In like some little disposable containers or something. I promptly ignored that advice. And since I have multiple products I haven’t used before and at least two bases to try things out on, I decided to try the still water on one base and the UV resin on the other.
Just in general, I think this UV resin stuff is pretty cool, I can see a lot of potential uses for this in the future. One very nice feature of the still water product versus the UV resin is that it self-levels. The UV resin needed some poking and prodding to smear out and fill in gaps. I did use the UV resin in stages, and that worked just fine too. The disadvantage to the still water product is that you can’t really pour it too thick and it needs 24 hours between layers to cure. And it shrinks. Like, a lot. The UV resin cures in about 40 seconds at least at this scale and using a decent little UV flashlight, and having that kind of speed makes it a very attractive choice. At least for small things like this. In fact, the still water is taking so long to do it’s thing, after this first application, which shrunk way down, I’m just dumping a thick layer on it for round two and then I’m going to top it off with the UV resin to finish it up in a couple days. Cause the thick layer literally took a couple days to dry.
Hey, I’m lazy AND impatient. Multi-classing, it’s the way to go.
But as for the “swamp” look, obviously my water effect is perfectly clear and perfectly wrong for swamp. I’ll have to look into adding either transparent paint layers in the future or even submerging fine flock or something to muddy up the overall effect. For now I just like this new little gimmick. And I did try to push in a couple of leaves to have them suspended in the resin and I do like how those turned out.
But there they are, three members of the dreaded Chromatic Savages tribe. There’s definitely additional techniques I’d like to use in the case of water bases in the future. Again like painting transparent colors between layers of resin, maybe adding splashes and ripples, stuff like that. But hey, one new thing at a time.
So now I just gotta pack these guys up and ship ‘em off and hope my daughter digs ‘em. I’m looking forward to seeing what she sends me in return, snake-lady-wise!
Three more minis done, feels good.
So, go finish something!
See ya!