Tutorial: Postapocalyptic Toad King

Good Morning Jungle Painters,

Tuesday brings you your latest choice from last weeks Tutorial Voting.
"Toad" won the last of it and Roman will tell his mind on the conversion work he has done for his "Quak! Frogs X-ing".

We hope you enjoy!

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FOREWORD
Best things come without a strict plan I'd say, sometimes.
They rise spontaneously, from fun, joy and sometimes careless madness. This happened with the Toad King conversion I did. I did enjoy the sculpt from the first moment on my eyes saw it and I decided to give this model a go, but I did not want to make him out of the box, somehow I was thinking to put him in a postapocalyptic environment, a mutant Toad King.

You can find a review on the basic model via Mu 43 - Toad King, Aradia Miniatures.


CONVERSION 
Allright, when I start such a conversion I check for proper material that fits in my theme (post-apo) and I like string to work with. Starting with cutting down the decoration on the frogs bracers and putting some string there with superglue.

My treasure I found during the painting class in Trier was an old can, flatten by too many cars and rusted. My treasure. My treasure, my treasure ... well, yeah, keep your eyes out for such treasures, some is carbage, but some can really keep you happy for a long time.

You can easily cut the can parts that you need and I went to create new armour with it to the Frogs bracers. The string beneath provides a realistic look of fixation there.

After placing more and more armour parts I went back for some more string. I spinned two of them to one to have a bigger rope and used it for a realistic fixation for his shoulder pad. I really wanted to make him look that - after his mutated brain grew - he was working on his armour himself.

You can see small knots have been done to add more string to it. And small knots look more realistic than just glueing it in place.

Conversion progress always goes hand in hand with further ideas so the burned car we did a while ago - click for tutorial here - can be seen in the following photo while more and more material and detail were put in place to the frog. Plastic bits, skulls by Origin Art.

I thought about using some parts from 1:35 Historical Soldiers but just went for a sign saying number "17". I can not tell you why, but I do like this number. If you take it by two you get 34 and if you minus it with 11, which is also a cool looking number you get my favourite number, 23. Easy, eh?

Fasten with knots ...

You might get a little stupid with all that string going on, to avoid this I had to cut and destroy the sign with the number 17 a little bit.

Lean back and have a look on your conversion works so far. This is important to not lose the overview on what you are working on.

You might have recognised this part here, which honestly I have no clue where it came from. As far as I remember it was some resin rest of the Toad's sprue. You can also see on how much fun you can have with the rusted can, bending, drilling and cutting it.

 Those strings, gnaarrggll ...
It was time to put the conversion and glued parts again under realistic thoughts and check with small tiny bolts which material got screwed home to another material.

 Those bolts by plusmodel are just awesome for many projects.

Cut them with a knife and bring them in place with a toothpick and superglue.

As I decided not to use his original Toad King Weapon it was time to prepare his hand for having a proper grip with a metal bar. The sign on too was done with BeeSPutty Plastic, baked in the oven.

The sign was glued in place, but I did not leave it that way. While I started with his crown - he is indeed a post-apo-toad-king - I worked with aluminum foil. Not the one you can get in the supermarket, I ordered thicker one at Modulor. With such a foil it is really fun to create realistic attachements as it bends easily around stuff.

Toad King's crown was done with a lot of joy, fun and little amount of madness. Going for it with a ripped apart part of the original crown I used a lot of tiny gear wheels from old watches, tutorial? Click here! If you don't want to destroy old watches or are just too lazy you can also get these via Hasslefree or PK-Pro.

 The basis of the crown:

 Now to superglue and bits:

Rusted can foil, string, a skull with 1:35 headphones, bolts, aluminium foil was used to bring that all together. A true mad crown:

Some etched signs also have been added to the model. They are really cool to work with and I do enjoy to give them some unique look by drilling and destroying them a little bit here and there.
You can buy such at PK-Pro or Hasslefree.

 I liked the idea of some more aluminium foil on top of the Toad's armour parts. For sure his brain is capable of doing little repairs here and there by himself.

You can also see the aluminum foil used on the metal bar ...


For the final work I used a chain and attached a small frog by Busch to it. A king can be a pimp, eh?
You can also see that I started to fill gaps with Liquid Greenstuff, but this leads to another article on painting him, one day.

 Quak!

THOUGHTS
Sometimes it is good to just let go if you want to do a crazy conversion, but it is also good to come back to thoughts on realism. Superglue can glue a lot of stuff together, with some more thoughts and easy tricks you can still keep it realistic.

Hope you enjoyed the article!

Keep on happy painting and converting!
Best Wishes,
Roman