... But then, trolls are very slow. It would be inappropriate for them to be finished too quickly. Let's just assume that I'd be producing them at a great rate of knots, but I am hindered by my inability to pass stupidity tests.
In truth, this post has been a long time coming. I did actually get the first of my 3D printed river trolls painted something like 6 weeks ago, but because I hadn't photographed him properly, I figured I would wait before posting here. But now it becomes apparent that my standards were unrealistic. Who knows when I'll actually set things up and take proper photos? So it's best just to use what I already have here...
I started off painting this guy as a prototype, and all I really knew was that he was going to have a blue-green skin colour and that his belly would be a different tone. Not having a clearer picture than this proved a bit of a blocker for me, and I was fiddling with lots of different paints to try to work out if I could blend it into a light skin tone or something else. In the end I went for a purple-light grey sort of thing. Even the basic blue-green of the skin didn't really come out the way I had imagined it would under my plan, but I'm OK with it anyway. I have questionable standards, after all.
He's actually one of the river trolls I converted after printing. I'm pretty sure I chose him at random. You can get a decent feel for the theoretically blue-green skin (which is really mostly green) here.
The skin gets roughly blended to purple for the belly, which is eventually highlighted up with a light grey colour. I've already forgotten exactly which colours I used. I'll regret that later.
His back is a bit rough, and actually includes a few places where I didn't do a good enough job of cleaning off the printing supports. He was black resin, undercoated black, printed in bulk. By the time it was easy to see these details, he already had paint on him. And in real life, these details really just look like little bumps or warts. They don't bother me enough to go back and fix them.
In the end, once he had his little details done and was based, I was happy enough with him. I decided I could handle following this as a rough template for the rest of the river trolls. I figure I might vary the colour of the tufts of hair a bit. These ones are kind of purple. I could easily have some that are black, some a little brown etc. Just things to add a little more variation to the unit.
I also decided that I needed to do some of the work on the remaining models en masse in order to save pouring too much paint and wash and wasting some. This could have been adding another hurdle for myself, but in the end I managed to give them all a base coat and a wash. They're all now mixed into a big troll pile on my painting table. I took this photo a couple of weeks ago. Nothing has moved since then. Stupidity, don't you know...
The painted guy is in the mix, along with a few GW trolls I half painted many years ago and am yet to finish. They're on this ride too. I want them to fit in properly with the new arrivals.
In the end I'll get there. But I make no promises about how long that will take...
