Remember this little guy from Part 1?
Yeah, I was supposed to have him done last weekend for last week’s Shared Topic over at Blog Azeroth, but as usual I underestimated my ability to get distracted.
Or overestimated my ability to stay focused. Sort of a 50/50 split there… Anywho, here’s Part 2 of his customizing journey!
And no, he’s still not painted yet.
Stage 1.5
Now that we have the basic positioning down, it’s time to start making this guy a little more troll-ish!
So what makes a troll? (Other than the wild color schemes, of course.)
I looked over the male troll forms as well as the druid bear and cat forms and came up with a list of commonalities: long ears, mohawk hair, feathering on the legs and jawline, tusks, braids, facepaint, and accessories.
List in hand, I started from the tail and worked my way forward. With lots of breaks in-between for the epoxy to dry.
Sadly, I tried a few different methods of attack, but was unable to get the tusks to work. I’m thinking that it might work best if I anchor in some jewelry wire, but that would require resculpting the whole lower face and I’m not up to that this time around.
But next time– G3 Mustang, maybe?
Thankfully the epoxy cured hard enough to not smudge after a few hours, but it needs a good 24 hours before I could start building over what I had, or start refining the ears.
The ears will look better later… promise!
Stage 2.0
Now that the basics are in place, it’s time to start refining things.
The first thing I did was to go in and carve out the ears and refine the shape. I still need to contour them a bit more, so the flow better, but that’s a gradual process.
Next I went back in and reinforce the mane in places. It still needs some work to smooth the flow out and I’m considering adding in the three rows that some of the models have. I’m pretty sure that was just Blizzard’s way of adding volume, but it might be nice to put in a nod to the modelers as well as the race designers.
After the mane and the ears, I went in to add the forelocks. There’s a braid on the left side and two flippy bits in the center and to the right. Right now it looks balanced against the rest of the mane, but I’ll have to check again if I build up the other bits.
The last thing I added (after the rest were in place) was the initial strap of the breastplate. It will end up with more detailing at the front and possible some additional work on the sides—right now I’m planning on using just paint to add depth and texture, but we’ll see.
You can see that he still needs some work on the mane on the left side as well as some refining of it so that it looks like it flows over the breastplate. Easy enough to fix, plus if I end up adding the additional rows it will makes things infinitely easier.
I’m debating on adding the arm bands in on the forelegs, but those will probably come with the next round of refining.
And then I can finally get on to the painting!
The current planned paintjob will be a combination of the bear and tiger forms with a blue coat and yellow mane and tail. I am seeing serious tiger striping in this little guy’s future… but we’ll have to see how things come out.
The war paint will be a combination of what’s seen on the male troll and the druid form models. I’m also going to pull some from historical war painting for horses, to make it form appropriate.
I was playing around with the idea of adding additional barding (horse armor), but decided against it. But it might be fun to do a future horse druid done up in tier-flavored armor… Hmm.
Anywho, that’s all for now, check back later this week for Parts 3 (final sculpting) and Part 4 (paintjob)… and possibly Part 5 (paintjob v2.0) if my Muses go crazy. 😉