Blue, Angry, and Scottish?

Wow it's been over two weeks since I last posted anything... As you may be able to guess, I've had a busy go of it! I've been painting, just not photographing and cleaning.

That said, there was a dangerous sale at a local gaming store recently, and I am now the guilty owner of an entire force of Trollbloods. I've had a Skorne force for some time, but never quite landed on a paintscheme I liked, and the more I looked at the faction in general, the less I wanted to play them as a default faction.

That said, by contrast, the Trollbloods have always been there in the back of my mind. Initially rejected for being too goofy, they gradually became the force I found the most interesting, the funniest, or at least the most desirable to paint... (Yep, I want to punish myself by painting tons of tartans. What's wrong with me?)

So, I broke them out, cleaned up every bloody mould line I could find, (missed a few because damn...) and decided to experiment with painting:

That's a warder, axer, and two impalers, skin mostly painted and on to the clothing.

Since I'm in no rush to get the force finished, I've been using it as a chance to experiment with painting methods I don't typically use. I'm trying out different methods of painting leather, an entirely new metal process, and of course, the skin. Ohh the skin. In the store there was no trollbloods skintone left, so I had to kind of fudge it from what I had around me. Interestingly, a colour I was making to play with my Morats wound up being what I wanted to try. It's a mix of 6 parts Light Turquoise to 1 part Yellow-Green (Vallejo) and then highlighted with straight white.

It looks like I've done a bit more vibrant a blue-green than the official Trollbloods colour, but I like it.

Gecko Shoulders Completed!

After the difficulty of creating the Escher shoulder, the remaining three actually went fairly smoothly and quickly! I haven't had time to upload them, but they each took maybe a few hours of effort.

On the same TAG as the Escher shoulder, I did a roughly-transcribed starfield, as though someone was using a thick brush and not too concerned with borders. I gave it a slight highlight from black to grey, then added a nice simple starpattern.

Then, in the same way one usually paints flat panels (highlighting from dark) we have the TAG's name (Space Gecko) and an adorable gecko in 1950s style imagined spacesuit! (Including helmet sheen!)

Next up was the name shoulder pad for my other TAG, which I decided to call "Huntress" - This is a fairly straightforward idea, which I decided to do because I figure at least one TAG had to have the under-dressed female painted on. In this case, a warrior woman holding a shield spearing a tiger (perhaps the Yu Jing tiger?)

Highlighted as with the gecko; the tiger's a mix of orange and brown, the skin tone is leather brown mixed with gradually increasing layers of pale fleshtone from Vallejo. The shield as you can see will be the Nomad icon.
 

And here it is finished! I decided to go wild on hair, (they are Nomads after all) and painting tigers to not look like weird orange wolves is hard! I contemplated covering her up in a trailing sheet or toga-like wrap of some sort, but decided it was more honest to just go for it.

For the final shoulder I decided to go a slightly different direction. After trying for a while to look up African art styles, I realized a lot of them either don't lend themselves well to shoulder painting, or have become incredibly overdone. (Much like the 'random Japanese/Chinese characters tattoo'.)

To that end, I decided to switch to the other major Terrestrial influence on Nomad culture; Central America!

I did some image searches for Mexican and similar art styles, and decided to try to imitate a gecko done up in that kind of pattern.

I don't really have progress photos because the interior painting went kind of fast, but behold, a Mexican styled gecko! With this shoulder painted, and all four coated in varnish to make sure I don't mess up their painting down the line, I finally got to assemble the geckos, so they don't look really silly with stubby little arms and massive legs! Now it's time for clean-up painting, tweaking highlights, and then applying decals. They will probably be put on the back burner for a bit with my Morats as I attempt to custom-make transparent bases for my Infinity stuff.

Up next, in all likelihood, Trollbloods! (Because I am good at focusing on a single game...)