Reaper's Marsh Troll - 77152

Staying with the big stuff but moving back to the pvc plastic - here is the Marsh Troll from the original Reaper Miniature's Kickstarter.  I think this one is unique in that there is not a metal master from which this mini was derived that I can find - I do believe that this sculpt originated as part of the Kickstarter and has only been produced in the new pvc plastic.

I went to town on this Friday night and then finished off some drybrushing on the base after the Monday night football game.  Again, my goal on these products is to produce a fast, efficient, game worthy paintjob and in that light I do no prep work to the model other than to put it on a base.  In this case it's the 2" base from Games Workshop (technically I think it's a 50mm monster base).  That covers the correct basing for a D&D 3.5 / Pathfinder role-playing game.

For the most part the camera shots came out pretty well - I was able to shoot it up using digital macro and the club gets a little blurry in the picks as it has a greater depth of field than the macro focus.

Painting Instructions for Marsh Troll:

A quick note on basecoating - I don't think I've mentioned in my previous posts - but when I used the spray primer there was a bit of tackiness that never went away on the first couple of bones figures that I painted.  While doing some research I came across some articles on the Reaper forums how others experienced the same thing.  The paint characteristics that work really well for metal don't work the same for this pvc material - what happens is that the primer actually eats into the pvc and doesn't completely dry - that's the tackiness.  It's best to use a straight black undercoat from your acrylic paint sets - just slightly watered down (not too much or it won't stick).  I've used that to great effect on my later models using a giant fat brush that I stole from my kids art set - works great.

In this case I actually did what Reaper recommends or at least states - that you can paint straight on the figure - while I found this true that you can, I really had to give it two coats to get the initial coverage that I wanted.  I used a double-coating of Reaper's Clouded Sea for the skin, Vallejo's Game Color Heavy Red for the plating, and Vallejo's version of Scorched Brown for the leather, fur, and cloth bits.

The paintjob is a combination of layering, drybrushing, and blending techniques...

I continued adding Skull White to the Clouded Sea and added a couple of layers to the skin until I ended up with the highlighting that I wanted.

The belly was carefully blended using Clouded Sea and Rotting Flesh - drawing the Clouded Sea color into the Rotting Flesh so that the highlight of the sagging belly was pure Rotting Flesh.

Next I used a combination of drybrushing on the plates which stick up starting with Blazing Orange, Golden Yellow, and then Skull White.

On the scales across the back, arms, and legs I used a drybrushing of Fiery Orange to which I then proceeded to add Skull White layer after layer - this gave me a cool orangey/pink/white highlight effect.

The fur was drybrushed Vermin Brown and Leprous Brown.

The leather was painted up with Snakebite Leather and Bubonic Brown highlights.

The club was Bestial Brown with highlights of Bubonic Brown and washed with Sepia ink.

The club spikes and finger/toe nails were done up with Bubonic Brown, Bleached Bone, then washed with Sepia ink, then highlighted with Bleached Bone and then a mix with Skull White.

The cloth was a layer of Dark Angels Green and then Snot Green for highlights followed with a final highlight of Scorpion Green.

The front loincloth was Bad Moon Yellow followed by a heavy wash of Sepia ink.

The final touch to the model was to drybrush the base - Codex Grey, Fortress Grey, and then a touch of Skull White.