Troll 2 - the Conversioning

 Back to the trolls! The Rockgut Troggoth kit is great, but it comes with a weird variety of bits. You get nine heads, six upper bodies, three necks and three lower bodies/legs. Inevitably, you end up with a lot of bits legs over. I wondered if I couldn't sculpt some bits to make an additional troll to join the "official" Warhammer ones (I'll call it a troggoth here, for clarity).

This is one of the lower body parts. They're all very similar.

I wasn't going to be able to sculpt something like this from scratch (if at all). I needed something to base the conversion around. I found this model in the bits box. Ironically, it's another troll, from the Reaper Bones range. It's much smaller than the Warhammer trolls, and like a lot of Bones miniatures, it's not a great model. However, its legs were about the right size, even though the feet were much too small.

So, I took a deep breath and hacked off its head and arms, and cut the upper body down into a cone that would fit into the upper body of the AoS troll.

I then sculpted over the mangled troll with DAS clay to make a suitable belly for the troggoth. I made this, which looks like an egg on legs. The blue pen marks show where the cone would meet the plastic troggoth upper body.

As you can see, I sculpted the new body a loincloth and some suitably huge clawed feet with green stuff. They're both pretty rough. I did a bit more sculpting. I covered the DAS clay with a thinned-down layer of PVA glue to seal it a bit.

The next problem was that I needed a neck for the troggoth. I found a piece of blue casting clay (it's called something like Onymatsu) and used it to make a cast from green stuff. This stuff doesn't hold fine detail all that well, but I waited for the green stuff to dry and carved it with a knife to get a suitably bumpy neck. You can see the ridges on the example on the right below.

The neck was added to the plastic body and the joins hidden with watered-down DAS clay. I chose this particular body because it was holding its weapon across its stomach, which would hide some of my ropey work.

Then it was time to assemble the entire thing, give it a head, and paint it.

One thing I'd not factored in is that the Reaper Bones models are made from some kind of bendy plastic. The weight of the troggoth threatened to bend the Reaper legs. I cut up some cork and a model column, and stuck it to the base to give the model some more support. The rocks touch his ankles and loincloth, and strengthen it all a bit.

And there he is! Was it worth all the effort? Well, sort of. It was a fun project and I'm pleased with the end result. At close inspection, his feet are much worse than the Warhammer once, but he'll pass a quick look, and it's nice to get to use the extra body. It was a lot of work, so I don't know if I'll do it again (I'd have to get another Reaper troll to hack up, for one thing). But I'm happy.