Rockgut Troggoth – Part 4. Not just any old rag & bone!

The Nurgle Tank remains my main project and that’s likely to be so for the best part of 2020. However, I’ve decided to stick with painting my Troggoth for a while in order to get him finished. That way I’ll have at least one finished mini to enter into some of next year’s competitions.

The Troggoth is gradually coming together and painting is well past the halfway point. I’m happy with the flesh tones so most of the remaining work involves finishing up the limbs and attaching (seamlessly!) the rock and hands.

But one area remained unresolved and it’s been bugging me! That’s the loincloth and it proved to be quite important to the overall scheme. My initial thoughts were to paint it as some sort of animal skin, possibly patterned with stripes. To that effect I blocked in some brown tones, but I instantly regretted it!

The brown was far too close to the overall tone of the skin. Some contrast of colour and tone was very much needed here! After further consideration I decided to use a cooler and darker colour for the loincloth. My choice was a dark cool grey with a subtle green hue.

Although it contrasts with the warm flesh tones the green hue will tie in with the rocks and boulders working as a part of the overall scheme. My base colour is a mix of Vallejo Dark Sea Blue and Scale Colour Black Leather. This is a very useful mix that I discovered when I was painting my Tomb King. By varying the proportions of the mix it’s possible to get either a cool or warm dark neutral tone.

To highlight the loincloth I added Scale Colour Field Grey to the mix and worked up to pure Field Grey. I finished off with a little Rakarth Flesh and Field Grey for the highlights. Field Grey is an interesting shade as it was a subtle green hue that adds some low-key colour contrast to my overall scheme.

I was instantly more comfortable with the result so I pushed on and worked a little texture into my painting. I didn’t want to overdo this but rather create a subtle look of worn and battered leather. To further the idea of hard use I added some orange/brown to the bottom edge of the loincloth. After all I don’t imagine a Troggoth’s loincloth would stay fresh and dainty for very long!

The palette of colours I used to paint the loincloth and bones.

The final touch was to paint the bones that are tied to the loincloth and here again contrast was key. Obviously the lighter bone colour would stand out against the loincloth but there were other factors to consider too. The highlights on the bones, and teeth, are warmer than the highlights on the rest of the model as I used Flayed One Flesh rather than a Rakarth Flesh and white mix. Once again I had to keep the contrast subtle but it helps to make these details pop out.

The loincloth may be a relatively small detail but it gave me the opportunity to introduce some colour and texture contrasts to the model, I think it successfully contributes to the Troggoth’s overall impact.

Sproket's Painting Masterclass at Element Games

The last few weeks have been a pretty intense time for me hobby wise and I’ve been left feeling a little tired, but very inspired.

I like to sit back and take time to reflect after a painting competition. But as soon as this year’s Golden Demon Classic was over I had to knuckle down and finish preparations for my Painting Masterclass at Element Games in Stockport. Although I’d painted enough of the Abyssal Warlord to serve as a reference model, I wanted to spend a little extra time refining the content and structure of my workshop. In addition to that I had to prepare a presentation for the ‘seminar’ being held on the Saturday Evening.

This was my first trip to the Element Games Gaming Centre and I was thoroughly impressed with it! It’s a great venue for a painting workshop with a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere. There is plenty of space and the facilities are excellent. There were HD screens linked up to a web cam for a close up and personal view of the painting and, later on, to display my slides for the evening seminar. The centre also has a bar and a well-stocked ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of a shop, so all the necessaries are catered for!

I’d realised while working on my Megaboss that the combination of non metallic metals (NMM) and stippling I was using could form the basis of a painting workshop. The Megaboss himself, though a brilliant model to paint, is just a bit too complicated to be a good workshop model. I wanted an armoured fantasy miniature that would be relatively quick to assemble and feature plenty of easily accessible surfaces. The Abyssal Warlord from Scale 75 proved to be perfect for the job!

While the main focus of the workshop was on specific painting techniques, it was important to provide some structure and context. Most of all I think it’s important to demonstrate how they could be used to play their part in an overall paint scheme. To that end, alongside the stippling and NMM, I also incorporated topics such as planning, colour theory and contrast into the weekend.

The practical focus for day one was on painting a NMM steel effect that transitioned from warm shadows to cool highlights. The colour palette we used works very well as it is tried and tested and this enabled everyone to concentrate their efforts on learning the stipple technique of painting. I prefer to get everyone painting at my workshops as quickly as possible. I think the best way to learn is by doing and I wanted everyone to have enough time to get comfortable with the ‘new’ technique they were learning before we went on to explore some potentially trickier colour palettes during day two.

By the end of day one everyone had gained in confidence and experience with stippling. I‘d stressed that speed came with practise and as the afternoon progressed this became very apparent! Many of the attendees found themselves able to do in 15 minuets what had earlier taken them a couple of hours.

Although a part of the whole weekend Masterclass evening seminar also functioned as a stand alone event and this gave me the opportunity to open things up. Titled ’10 Top Tips, Tricks and Techniques’ I presented a selection of my favourite techniques and materials and showed how I had used them in my work. It’s probably no surprise to anyone that microbeads featured!

For day two we turned our attention to painting first a cold gold tone and then black metal. Both of these use simpler colour palettes than the steel we’d painted the day before but, as I mentioned earlier, they can be tricky to get right. It’s necessary to carefully control both the hue and saturation of the colours in these palettes as even subtle variations can alter the finished effect dramatically!

I’d made a point of putting the NMM colours in order of increasing difficulty. I wanted to present a challenge that would push everyone out of their comfort zones, but not traumatise them. It was hugely rewarding to see how everyone got to grips with the challenges, were able to resolve them, then move on and cope with the increasingly difficult colour palettes. I’d expected that by the end of the weekend there would be in a great variety in the results achieved. While it’s true that some painters got more of the model covered than others they all demonstrated a solid grasp of the techniques we had covered over the weekend. Everyone had reached the point where they will be able to take what they had learned over the weekend and apply it appropriately to their own project. I really couldn’t have asked for a better result!

I also have a partially finished Abyssal Warlord to attend to. I’d considered keeping him as a work in progress to use in teaching but after the workshop I’m feeling too inspired to leave him as he is. During the Masterclass we had some very useful discussions about how the Warlord could be completed and I came away with some great ideas for my own take on him.

Things are going to get very ‘Abyssal’, there will be tentacles and microbeads … Watch this space!