Transcript
I don’t have an appropriate clip for today’s painting subject, so I just grabbed one of my old highlights from back in the day of a game by the same company that’s inspiring today’s painting project. And I don’t have an appropriate clip because I kicked that addiction cold turkey twelve years ago, and that was back before I ever captured clips of anything.
I’m a late adopter, what can I say.
I found this figure a couple years ago on Etsy and immediately knew how I wanted to paint it up. And that’s Warcraft style!
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we paint a mini just for fun and without any particular game in mind! And we thank out patrons, the wind beneath our bbq wings. Tabletop Alchemy, get your spray can cheese here.
All right, how many of you dear viewers were addicted to – I mean “played” – World of Warcraft? I played the first two expansions and, here’s a little personal nostalgia, I first downloaded it thinking my oldest daughter would dig it, she was 11 or 12 at the time. And it was both of our’s first experience with an MMORPG. And when we started it up for the first time, we sat side by side at my desk and she chose the race – Night Elf – and I chose the class – Hunter. And while I will always argue with my buddy about the insipid nature of the term “member berries”, I’ll always have a fond memory of that now-defunct night elf starting zone Teldrassil.
That environment was so atmospheric and gorgeous to roam around in and the music and sounds were just fantastic. And for the first couple of days my daughter and I split the keyboard. One of us drove while one of us punched the combat buttons. It was silly, but it was fun and just an awesome father-daughter moment.
This troll warrior miniature is straight up World of Warcraft, there’s no doubt about it. And I have two specific things I’m looking forward to painting that I think will really sell the WoW factor – that’s World of Warcraft factor.
So this guy’s been sitting in primer for a year at least, hanging out in the Pile of Opportunity, Primed and Ready Edition display case, and he’s on one of those bases from Micro Art Studio. Right off the bat, I’m going for some classic WoW, blue troll skin tones. Now obviously trolls come in a variety of epidermal shades but I wanted to go with the classic blue both because it’s sorta classic and it’s gonna be a good contrast for the other colors I’ve got planned.
Red’s another pretty classic WoW color, at least for the Horde, right, but to keep the armor a little bit differentiated, I’m putting down a more rusty red on the pants here. I’ll use some of the brown I mixed into the pants color – trousers for you Brits – I use that brown for the base leather tone.
And then I added a little bit of purple for the pants shading, again, to keep playing with variation in the red tones.
As always you gotta do some touch up when you’re gonna put down either transparent paints or lighter colors and I like this AK 3rd Gen Pale Gray for that. In fact, I’m liking this AK 3rd Gen paint line more and more as I use it more and more.
This Shyish Purple contrast paint goes on almost black, so while I wanted to give some color to the boots, I didn’t want them to stand out too much, even though bright armor pieces are definitely a wow thing. You’re always looking all mismatched until you hit the higher levels in the game – transmog wasn’t a thing back when I played. Some wildwood contrast for the banner staff and then it’s on to highlighting the skin.
I’m pretty terrible at painting muscles and bare flesh, this is something I need to work on. For some reason, the fact that it’s not actual “skin tone” makes it a little easier but still. I put down a second highlight knowing that I’m going to wash this all down with a blue shade. I used drakenhof nightshade, but it is the old formula and it’s a pretty old bottle of paint. I’m not sure it worked the way it was supposed to, it seems to have introduced a lot of texture over the top of the highlights rather than smoothing them like I wanted.
Oh, right, I forgot to the hit the banner headpiece with the red and I use more of that pale gray to pick out the raised detail in prep for the gold metallics.
Which we put on now, starting with this darker, dimmer gold from Scale 75, I typically use their metallics the most. And painting all these spikes and armor trim is definitely as much of a pain the ass as it looks like it is. And there’s quite a bit of gold going on with all these bracelets and the sword hilt and the banner thing. I used a slightly lighter gold to kind of hit the tops of all the spikes and introduce a tiny bit of highlighting. Not that it’s really noticeable.
I have no idea what this spikey ball thing is, it’s like a cross between an incense censor and some kind of fantasy bomb slash morning star thing. I think dark iron has the right feel and we’ll put some rust on it in a bit.
Some purple highlights for the boots, again, just to bring up some of that World of Warcraft flavor and I also have a color plan here, kind of. Little touches of a brighter purple to seal the deal, even though I still want the boots to be dark but just with a hint of that purple vibe.
Now for some typical leather highlighting, I kinda use this recipe for most leather accents, putting in a first highlight and then adding a second highlight that I try to put down with some scratches and stippling techniques for texture.
Then some washes, Army painter soft tone for the leather and Citadel Sepia – the old formula – for all this crazy gold. I just cover the red armor in it too cause it would be a nightmare to try NOT to hit those reds. Washes are always my favorite part.
While the wash is drying I hit the cloth straps on the banner staff – I’m sure they’re supposed to be leather but I wanted to get some brighter contrast in the colors there, so I decided they were some kind of canvas strips or whatever.
In the wash mood, I figured smudging down this pain censer with black contrast would be about right for the end look.
And then again while that dries, it’s back to the strips for some tiny highlights.
And now it’s time to highlight the edges of the gold and the armor trim and the sword hilt. This just took a long time, there’s so much of it everywhere. I typically hit finished miniatures with a matte coat, which always dulls down any metallics and I always have to go back after the matte coat to retouch those metallics. With all this gold, that’s gonna be a lotta work. I should have thought about that and finished and matte coated everything else before doing any of the gold.
As we say in the industry: oh well.
To highlight the armor, I intentionally wanted to make it a brighter, more rich red than the pants. Trousers. With all the spikes and stuff, the red highlights are just kinda little dabs here and there, but I think it’s working. And I finish with my favorite red, popping little dots in the middle of all those little dabs.
So here we go, how about a little rust to add insult to injury when you get hit with this thing? Ain’t that just like a troll, slinging tetanus around as a parting gift?
And now the answer to that purple boot question – a huge swath of purple for the banner. It took me a while to decide on the banner color, and I don’t know why but I think it’s gonna work with the two signature color features I’ve had planned from the start. As an afterthought I realized the banner panels are stitched together and maybe they should have some variation in color or texture. So I just quickly darkened one of them.
And then purple contrast over the whole thing for shading which actually kinda desaturates the purple while it darkens it, and that is all right.
In preparation for the coming contrast treatment, I added some white highlights to all the sharp edges of the jagged sword hoping they’ll do their job under the transparent paint. Also adding some of these white highlights for the same reason to the hair-do. The hair-do? To the hair.
There’s always another little detail to hit, so some quick picking of the stitches on the banner with that same canvas color.
And now, time for the first of my two initial ideas for this guy – a bright green sword! How WoW is that? This is a great contrast color too, in fact, I kinda like all the greens in the Contrast line. But weapons in the game are typically standout features and this green is pretty stand out-ish, right?
And the second initial idea – you knew that magenta hair was coming, c’mon! I mean, if you’ve played wow for five minutes, you probably knew it was coming. I think if you google WoW troll, this is all you’re gonna see.
Highlighting the hair I wanted to try to maintain the saturation of the brighter color, but that’s a tough deal when you start working with pinks or very light colors into a mix, because white in general has a tendency to desaturate stuff. While I was doing this I kept thinking that I probably need to pick up some fluorescent paints to try out.
I added some very subtle white highlights to the sword, just to pop the edges a bit more, but I tried to be really careful with this step, I didn’t want to have to try to retouch contrast paint, that’s always a problem because of the transparency.
And for this dude’s eyes, I just darken them, they’re so small I’m not gonna sweat highlights or anything like that.
And then it’s time for the base! I just slap some dirty green and gray all over it, even some brick red but you don’t get to see that cause my camera card hit capacity and I didn’t realize it had stopped recording, so, you know, bask in the professionalism.
A bunch of dry brushing with neutral gray and pale gray to bring the detail back and then it’s time for the washes. Washes always make everything better, they gotta be the best crutch in the armory, right?
And there he is, the World of Warcraft inspired troll, with tufts applied! That pink hair and green sword were the two ideas I had from when I first saw the figure on Etsy. I’m not a huge fan of all the gold but I think it ended up working okay, especially from the Blizzard aesthetic. Now I didn’t do my standard finishing matte coat, and maybe I will at some point, and then of course I’ll have to go back in and retouch all the metallics, so for now, he’s going on Instagram as is.
Pretty fun mini to paint and it’s always nice to knock something out of the Primed and Ready display case. Put another check in the done department, right?
So, you know, go paint something fun, maybe even something not game-specific!
See ya!