First Trollbloods Painted

So Sunday I decided to sit down and start on the Trollbloods as my next painting project.  I've satiated my 40k painting for awhile, and fantasy seems to have stalled, so they seem like the best project to pick up next even though I've yet to play a game with Trollbloods and have no idea when I'll find the time.

I had done a bit of research on painting trollbloods online, and even picked up the the P3 Trollblood paint set.  Still I wasn't sure I wanted to jump straight into on of the larger beasts, so to start with I picked out a small troll whelp to test some colors.

This guys is a little smaller than a GW goblin.  I mostly wanted to experiment with the skin tones. 

Between the experimentation and the scale of the model I find he looks a little blotchy.  The main problem I had was I found the Trollblood Base color is nowhere near as blue as many of the Trollblood minis look in the books.

So with some experimentation done, and feeling like I had a pretty good grasp on how I was going to tackle the blending and color scheme I decided to start on the Troll Impaler.

So here you can see the blending of the skin tones came out much better with a little more practiced hand and certainly it helps working on a larger model.

One other thing I tried to work out was that there was a lot of leather/cloth on this model.  I wanted to not look like he was just wearing one color, which is something I feel like my orks suffer from a bit.  So I went for three different shades- a dark brown leather for the 'kilt', a more red leather for the spear holder and straps, and a lighter cloth for the arm/foot/spear wrappings.  The dark brown and the red are the only thing I'm not so sure about in that they seem still to be really close on the color wheel.  I kinda feel like they should stand out/apart more but... I'm not going back now!

This is the first time I've combined my two most common metal techniques.  Either I usually use my dirty wash (the 'Smoke' from Vallejo) or I use a normal black wash.  This time I used them both, and with a little trial and error I think the result came out pretty well.  I still used my normal Mithril Silver to highlight the armor.

Also this is the best shot to see the purple to red blending of the... uh, is that hair?  I'm not sure.  Anyway I liked this coloring that I've seen on some of the other Trolls so I decided to go with it on the Impaler rather than the darker blue PP shows.

Chickens amuse me.  Though I'm not sure if they really are chickens for scale purposes.  Really large turkeys maybe?  Anyway it is still amusing.

I decided to go with the same basing that I've used on my orks.  It is simple and efficient and I think the end result looks great.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the Troll Impaler.  There is always room for improvement but I think once I get a few more done it will be a nice looking force to put on the table.  Of course I still need to find that mythical time to get them on the table for a game.

In the meantime I just need to decide if I want to go into the larger Troll Bomber model next, or jump straight into my warcaster Gunnbjorn!