Center of the Labyrinth

The monsters stirred, those demons, those fiends - who haunted the moors, the wild marshes, and made their home in a hell. Not Hell but hell-on-earth. Spawned in that slime of Caen, murderous creatures banished by the Creator, punished forever for the crimes of their abhorrent Sire.

An early acquisition for the project was a pair of mark II plastic Trollblood battlegroup boxes.  Getting two of them wasn't originally in the plans, but as the old saying goes, "No plan survives contact with a 30% off sale at the hobby shop".  So we ended up with two each of Madrak1 (one of whom would be eventually be the base of a Madrak2 conversion) and the Troll Axer, and a hefty four Troll Impalers... all solid little beasts, albeit rarely taken in those quantities in Hordes.

The heavy armor on the troll beasts inspired the idea to transform them in to minotaur warriors, following the general aesthetic made popular by the Warcraft computer game franchise, and a pile of leftover WHFB plastic minotaur bits provided the fuel for the converto-forge.  Of course, connecting the two together required some aggressive cutting and resulted in some significant gaps, visible below.  As is often the case, patching these holes ended up taking most of the time for the build.

"My gaps are killing me!"

Most of that gap-filling was done by sculpting on fur.  Additional fur was used to connect the manes to the backs, fill the gaps at the shoulders, and at the wrists.  I cut back the troll feet and sculpted hooves, which both look neat and make it completely implausible that these guys would be able to balance in a bipedal stance.  Thank the Gods for fantasy physics keeping them aloft, I guess.  Who needs toes when you have the Power of Imagination ^tm?

"If you see that guy Physics hanging around here, making some
snide comment about my center-of-gravity, or my ground-pressure,
tell him I'm going to give him a compelling visual demonstration
of F = M x A, using this spear and his face."

Given the large number of certain Impale-y models, we decided to convert one of them to a Bouncer, using some handy parts.  The spikey-ball was a leftover from a 40K ork kit (I think), with an added jewelry chain.  The shield is a minotaur shield glued on to a spare 30mm base, with some putty sculpted around the perimeter to dress it up a bit.

We ended up doing two each of Impalers and Axers, and the Bouncer pictured above.  The sixth troll we set aside for some future project.  The rest of the pics are below.  As always, thanks for reading!  I'll be following up with the Painting entry for these guys shortly.