Wednesday, May 15, 2013

An Ambitious Project

For about the past 2 weeks, my brushes have been sitting rather still.  Every now and then its good to take a break from painting and do other things (like video games), otherwise you get rather burnt out and when you inevitably do burn out, you tend to stay away from the paints alot longer than if you just took a breather.  That's how it is for me at the very least.

Over the past few weeks while I've been painting my Minas Tirith army while I prepped for Adepticon, I've casually been collecting some of the newer models being released.  More specifically, an evil hunter orc themed force.  I had originally planned on holding off on the newer stuff, but the models look really cool and after a few good deals on ebay, I had a rather sizable force that needed assembly and some paint.

I spent the bulk of Saturday cutting sprue, assembling, and cleaning up the models, and this is what I have so far...


So far, we have 2 boxes of regular hunter orcs (24), a box of fell wargs (6), a box of hunter orcs riding fell wargs (6), Bolg (going to be leading this rabble), and Narzug and his wicked ranged abilities.

With Bilbo's Birthday Bash coming up in November, now would be the perfect time to get started on this ambitious project.  I'll need 750 points, so I'll still need to get Fimbul the Hunter, another box of Hunter Orcs, and possibly Yazneg unless they release a generic captain model in the near future.  I think with the next box of hunter orcs, I'm going to be doing alot of conversion work with weapon and head swapping to give the army the less monotonous look.  I also plan on painting and basing the dead orcs to use as objective markers.

The goal is to have this army painted and playable before summer ends and I'm hoping to really get started this upcoming weekend.  I still plan on diverting into other projects and hopefully finishing a good chunk of my Gondorians during this time as well.  I'll be updating as I go.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Denethor, Stewart of Gondor

So here's a model that's been sitting around on my work table for awhile now.  I finally slapped some paint on him the other day and here are the results.


Pretty easy model to paint as there weren't alot of colors other than greys and blacks.  4 different shades of skin tone and a little gold.  I'm still trying not go go overboard on highlights for cloth, but I think I'm getting better at it.  Black tends to be one of those colors that's rather hard to paint.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

The Goblin King

I'm not crazy about this miniature, but he was one of those mini's that tends to humble you when you think your painting skills have progressed at a fast pace, only to come face to face with a model that you can't quite get to look the way you want it to.  I actually originally painted this miniature right before I started working on The Knight of the White Tower.  I wasn't all too thrilled with how he turned out since for some reason, every time I tried to dry brush him, the paint would almost like clump in patches, giving him an almost scaley like appearance.  I actually painted and stripped this particular model 3 different times.  My second attempt at him I ended up with him being way too pale to my liking as I went way too strong with the white highlights.  My third attempt I accepted the patchiness that my dry brushing kept producing and decided to go back and fourth with the different skin tones to show more contrast rather then a bad dry brushing.  Have a gander at him....


I think dry brushing is a good quick method, but it definitely has its drawbacks.  Over the past few months of painting, I think this model taught me many lessons that I hope will make me a better painter overall.