The Blue Fellas

Now that the Deathmarks are done I've got a little bit of time to work on one of my own hobby projects. Warmachine and Hordes have really been taking off amongst the hobbyists at Heroes and Legends and I've wanted to get involved for a long time. I've been told, and I have seen (I had a demo game with one of the Legends), that it's a fantastically tactical and fun game with some really nice models. The armies are all so full of character it was hard to choose one to start with. In the end, I settled with blue-skinned, Scottish-inspired rabble-rousers, the Trollbloods.

I was particularly inspired (read: amused) by that enemy of all things sober, Borka Kegslayer. As you can guess by his name, he likes a good drink almost as much as he likes a good brawl. I thought he'd be a really fun character to base an army around.

The first thing I knew I wanted in a Trollblood army were some Trollkin Champions. In game terms these guys are HARD.

The Champions in progress

I bought these boys a while ago and they've been glued together for ages - I just hadn't managed to get round to painting them yet. A quick base-coat of Chaos Black and these guys were ready to have some paint applied. I grabbed by trusty drybrush, whacked out some P3 Cold Steel and painted all the metal parts of their armour (of which there is A LOT). I want their armour to look really rusty and battle-worn, to which end I followed the layer of Cold Steel with a very watered-down wash of Bestial Brown. It still looked a little bit too bright to me, so I followed that with a wash of Badab Black mixed with Scorched Brown (very watered-down again), but only into the recesses. Finally I went over some of the raised areas again with a thin layer of Cold Steel. 

I'm relatively happy with the result but I'm unsure of how it will look on the model as a whole when it is completed. Because of this I've decided to paint up this chap on the right as a sort of a test before I complete the others, just to make sure I know I'm on the right track.

Their skin will be painted in the manner typical of Trollbloods and I'll be attempting some two-brush blending on these guys, which I've never tried before. Using tutorial videos found here and here to help me along I'm just going to give it my best shot. As of yet I am undecided on how to paint their tartans. The plan is to get the rest of the model painted (skin, leathers, base and brass) to get an idea of what sort of colours would work well. At the moment I'm leaning towards a snowy base, perhaps with some foliage, but we'll see how it looks when I get to that stage. All in all I'm really rather excited to be painting models that are so different to anything I've done before.

In other news, I've bought myself a daylight-bulb, portable desk lamp from Ott-Lite and it should be arriving in the post sometime this week. I've read positive reviews, particularly here, and I think both my eyes and my painting would benefit from some Vitamin D. 

That's all for today folks, stay tuned to see how I get on with the Trollbloods and my new gadget. Comments and criticisms are appreciated as always.

Au revoir!