Wizkids Raging Troll - WZK90081

 

My "fun" with Vallejo's Xpress Color paints continues - with some limited success and a major fail. I had picked up the raging troll from Wizkids at the local game store when I picked up some additional standard Vallejo Game Color paints that I was close to running out - plus Vallejo has refreshed its Game Color line and I picked up some of the new colors. I'll report on my opinion of the new formula in a future post. 

The Wizkids line comes with a Vallejo grey primer from the factory. Before starting to paint I aggressively hit the troll with a top down drybrushing using Vallejo Dead White to provide the highlighting slapchop on the model.

Best Xpress Color for a troll... Troll Green of course - so I used my handy dandy Xpress Color paint chart and came up with Troll Green for the body, Plague Green for the cloth, and Black Lotus for the hair - more or less following the 5e Monster Manual picture. Being cognizant of the bubble issues, I took great care to brush any of those out - they tended to appear when I used larger quantities of paint on the brush - which the brush does tend to load up a large quantity of the Xpress Color paint because of how thin the paint is - almost an ink. Keeping it basic with minimal colors and letting the contrasting of the paint do its job, I finished within an hour. It was a serviceable paint job.

I say serviceable, because when I finished I did something I hadn't done - I hit it with Testors' Dullcote and crud was that a mistake! It appeared to either reactivate the Xpress Color paint or dissolved it at the high levels of the model where the paint was thinnest (vs the recesses where the paint was thickest). The green didn't have as much of an affect, but I think that's because the green covers a smoother area? The black was hit pretty hard as the top ridges actually show the white drybrushing. However, worst of all was the Plague Green on the cloth - it just ate through the paint giving it a very bleached out look.

Now, if I had spent tons of hours I'd be pissed. As it's a test piece and still suitable for the gaming table, I figure I'll just live with it as is and do some more testing to determine what's going on. I do know that the Testors' spray can is okay because I used it to dullcote the six Redbrand goons which were painted using Vallejo Game Color and there was no problem with the paint on those models. Those turned out perfect.

Therefore I'll do some more testing on additional models painted with Xpress Color - both using Testors' again as well as using another brand of matte spray. Additionally, I can try giving a go using Vallejo's matte through an airbrush.