Quick and Dirty Painting – Krielstone Bearer and Stone Scribes

by Goris

You know them!  You love them! They are a must have in nearly every Trollblood army.  And I was tired of them not being painted, so this installment of Quick and Dirty Painting brings you the Krielstone Bearer and Stone Scribes!

After such an amazing response from the Trollblood community last time, I have modified my methods a little and will break down the easy steps I use to make my models pop with minimal effort for the everyday painter.

Step 1

As simple as it sounds: base coat EVERYTHING.  Make sure you get even paint coverage on everything on the model.  No metal showing.  You can easily go over things if you don’t like the color later and it’s much easier to paint over errors when they clearly contrast the paint already on the model.  It’s also nice to pick the general theme of the model during this phase as well.  I’ve recently decided my Trolls will be of the Red Sash Kriels.  They might even be a back story if I decide to make one!  The colors should be pretty obvious for everything here as I have few paint colors and I try to keep it as simple as possible.

Trollblood Base – Skin
Bootstrap Leather – Pants, Shoulders, Tunic
Cold Steal – Weapons, Armor
Gold – Hilts and Top Sections on Weapons
Burgundy – Sash/Tartan

Inbetween these steps I droped a scribe…it was bad…

Crisis Averted!

Step 2

After great feedback from the community I decided to do a wash early on in the process here and I have to say that I achieved great results. The subsequent steps will show how it improved my method.  But, I digress.  I used a simple black wash 50/50 mix and washed the entire model, making sure to try and stay on the lines of armor and in the crevasses of cloth and skin to avoid getting that overly dirty look that washes can give.  This worked to varying degrees, but you can easily touch up later or wash over it again with the desired colors for greater effect later.

Note: Before you wash the first time, I find it’s very effective to dot the eyes and paint the teeth on the model as the wash will really give those features prominence early on and cover up any sloppy parts you may have had issue with.  So doing this early can go a  long way to making the face of your model much cleaner overall.

Step 3

Here is where I start going into the fine detail on the models.  As you can see, I started adding the gold touches to the leather armor, the stitches to the leather pants, the gold touches on the runes and other fine details.

One thing you might note is that all my Trolls do have a true underbelly.  What better color for this then…Underbelly Blue. With most reptiles, the underbelly differs in color and has a defined area.  I sort of winged with for where I think my underbelly should go, and you can see from the results that this worked well.  The chins in particular make the models' faces really pop as well as opening up interesting ways to highlight.

Step 4
Here I start adding muscle definition and facial highlights, using Trollblood Highlight. Starting at the face and using very little paint I go over all the hard ridges on the face to make the features come out.  With certain areas like the cheeks you can wet the tip of the brush with your mouth, and blend those lines into the skin as they trail off.  With the muscles simply follow the ridge lines on the body were your wash was and then blend the same way gently fading the lines into the skin.  Lastly for a simple but nice look, I used a fairly fine brush and painted on the veins in the Stonebearer’s arms and the dots on his chin with the same red I used on the Tartan.

Step 5

I left the stone itself off, as I knew it would be the real center piece of the mode,l and very important for the over all look.  So, start with your base colors.

Trollblood Highlight – Stone
Trollblood Base – Skin
Bootstrap Leather – Leather

Step 6
This stone is old as hell and been dragged through every kind of battlefield out there, so you want this thing looking dirty.  Wash the hell out of it and leave a signifigant amount on it to dry and give a little age to it.  Wash the hands normally and let it sit to thoroughly dry.

Note:  I was an idiot and started painting before I "greenstuffed" the gaps in the stone itself.  This can be solved simply by using 2 heavy coats of paint along those edges to help fill.  This didn’t work particularly well for mine unfortunately and I am far to lazy to strip is and start over.  So, on with the show!

Step 7
In this step, you want to find the most neon of whatever color you want to sit in your glowy runes.  I chose green, because…why not?  I used a 50/25/25 Paint, water, medium mix for this.  The medium makes the paint glossy and not dry so quickly.  This helps when you are trying to fill in those runes but you don’t want that really bright color to linger on the stone itself.  Let each face of the stone dry before you turn and it move on, otherwise the paint could run or settle strangely, and that wouldn’t look very nice.

Step 8

Once the runes have all dried, a simple highlight on all the of the hard edges of the stone will divide the sections and make each stand out.  If your cracks or other details aren’t pronounced enough, wash them again, but make sure to not dull those pretty runes that you spent so much time working on.

And there you have it folks!  This concludes another installment of Quick and Dirty Painting on the scrum. Leave feed back here at the blog or at the Trollblood forums!