"They call me Mad Jack, and if there is anybody in these mountains that knows the real story about the Trollkin Skinner, that'd be me. So I'm putting it down in writing just how it happened in hopes of setting the record straight."The trollkin skinner is a model for which I knew I HAD to do a conversion as part of this project. With his Crockettlike coonskin cap and a knife large enough to impress an Australian action hero, it's a goofy model by any measure - but also an endearing one.
I ended up cutting this model in to a very large number of small parts with a jeweler's saw, and then reassembling them in to something resembling the pose of the original. I wanted to get the orc head and hands on there, as usual. But I was also unsatisfied with the legs on the original skinner. It's one of the older trollkin models and, like a lot of the early releases, looks somewhat thin next to the rest of the range.
A priority here was keeping the distinguishing features of the original, namely the cap and skinning knife, intact. In the reassembled model, the head, forearms, hands and legs are all from plastic orcs. The torso, hat, knife and scabbard are maintained from the original skinner.
The skin tone selected for this one is a substantially darker green than on most of the Fennblades, which were painted around the same time. The rest of the paint scheme is fairly muted as well - a deliberate choice since this is a model that's supposed to be camouflaged in the woods, and to appear behind the enemy.
That's all true, the darker palette was largely achieved by slathering on healthy quantities of GW Agrax Earthshade to the various surfaces. The other choice made on the painting side of this article was that the coat was a recovered Cygnar coat that had seen a lot of use, wear, and tear. My nemesis plays a lot of Cygnar. So it was painted in a much more vibrant blue and yellow originally, then muddied down a lot.
Last painting detail worth mentioning if the Dundee sized knife the skinner has. I wanted to give an extra splash of color to it, and was experimenting with the GW Technical paints, this one was Blood for the Blood God that gives a thick, gloppy, well....blood.
