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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Hills are Alive with the sound of... Troll beasts?

So as alluded to in my last post, the crafting halls of Karningul have been hard at work with hill trolls. Lots. of hill trolls. First by adding some finishing highlights to Buhrdur - a.k.a. The hill troll.


highlights added to skin and leather, tarnishing on metal
he still looks a bit grey in photos though - skintone is actually on the greener  side


enter the poor man's lightbox: a flashlight from 2' away and a sheet of white paper

just another gratuitous sword shot. I love that thing.

With the troll chieftain completed, the urgency of "chieftain of whom?" began to take its toll. Away went the paints, out came the modeling clay. With the assistance of some pretty nice tutorials for sculpting fur, some plasticard, some old newspaper and a scavenged warg head (sorry Tavros), I set about converting the troll clan.

very small pieces of slightly crumpled newspaper covered in superglue seems to make a decent stab at cloth coverings, with strips of thin plasticard  for the leather strappings to tie it in place  
for a first attempt at sculpting fur in this quantity, I think it turned out decently well.

you know, I think that head looks better there than it did on the warg. apology retracted Tavros. 


some small jewelry chain added. after the clay hardens this will be glued
 in place across the chest to connect with the existing troll chain in his other hand

I have three cave trolls in my collection - about to accidentally be four. Having the trolls w hammer and spear, I attempted to order the really schweet hammer-overhead pose, but somehow G-youknowWho managed to bungle that and send me the old hammer version instead. When I called them on it, they offered a free replacement - with the "mistake" essentially as a gift. I guess customer service isn't dead in this world after all! Only this means I know need to come up with a fourth conversion... I guess there are worse problems to have.

troll with... no spear. still tinkering with the weapon arm. it seemed better to finish that before attaching

Opening the 2013 LOTR Fashion season with the latest accouterments from the slopes
of the Misty Mountains: warg pelt cuffs. Ooo la la!  

all questions of "so how exactly does a troll skin a warg with out destroying the pelt?" aside,
I think these have turned out pretty well. Very promising for the rest of the project.


I think that is a good break point for now. I'm planning to get the first one finished and painted up before I get too far with the others. I want to make sure things actually work before I've committed 4 trolls to this project. Gives me a chance to make tweaks and sculpting adjustments. Any pointers from the peanut gallery are more than welcome...

4 comments:

  1. Nice work on the trolls - major fan of the use of wargs for the pelts.

    If you happen to have a large number of grunt units around, have you considered using dying infantry on your models? Been thinking about it for Eomer's model, so I thought I'd mention it to you here.

    Tell the forge masters at Karmingdul that the boys at the How tell them, "Keep up the good work!" :)

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I've thought of the idea before (or putting spare gear on the ground at least), but I'm not sold on it. The problem is that it ties your model to one specific enemy - leading to the "Umm... why is there a dead gondor guy on the ground when you are fighting elves?" That and it requires either buying surplus minis to butcher or trying to bum a spare off someone (and we don't usually have guys to spare). My armies don't have specific arch-enemies like Rohan has with Isenguard (Gondor being the closest - but I rarely fight them).

      You on the other hand can safely put an orc on your base and you're pretty much set with whatever - they thematically fit with all of your armies (and would look pretty epic sprawled under Firefoot). I have a box of new orcs if you want to cast some corpses... I wouldn't mind the chance to cast some gondorian gear before you paint up your new force too

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  2. Nice trolls. Well done of the fur sculpting, very effective.

    ReplyDelete
  3. B-b-b-b-but!?!... Why must the wargs be persecuted so? I mean, sure it _looks_ all cool and awesome and dandy but that poor creature had a family! *tear* and now he's not coming home! ever!

    Awesome work. Looks fantastic. Makes me want to go skin a horse...

    ReplyDelete