Radagast the Brown

After painting a bunch of guys for my Gondor army recently, I wanted to mix it up a little bit with something a bit different next.  I still had my Radagast special miniature from The Hobbit boxset sitting on my desk and after seeing Garfy's tutorial over at Tale of Five Painters, I thought I would give it a go.  Part of the reason I put this particular mini off for as long as I did was because of all the intricate details needing to be painted along with all the different colors involved.  So I spent my Friday and Saturday night painting this little gem, and was pleasantly suprised with how he turned out.

The before image with just him primed black

After my long hours of painting him

And another angle of him.

So now all the forces of good are painted up from The Hobbit boxset.  Not sure where I'm going to go from here, but I'll probably get started on something tomorrow.

Gondor Pt 5

So over the past week I had some time off due to it being extremely slow at work, so I've been cranking out my Gondor Army rather quickly, and I'm at about 600 points now.  Here's what I've been up to....

Here is a WIP of the Rangers I was working on

Here is the finished product with Damrod in the lead

Knowing what I know now, white was probably not the best primer to use since it took many layers to just get the dark base of the cloaks to show thru.  Live and learn.

8 Warriors of the Dead

I was a little hesitant about including these guys, but after facing them many times in battle, I knew no Gondorian army would be complete without a contingency of them.  Unfortunately, the King of the Dead hasn't come in the mail yet, so they remain leaderless (and unplayable) till he gets in.  I was able to crank out these 8 in one sitting and the paint scheme I used was a little more complex than I thought it'd be since I used a Shadow Grey basecoat.  The blonde beards was a bit bright to my liking, so I after I painted and highlighted them, I washed it with a green wash giving it a diluted color.

 

And the backbone of any Gondor/Minas Tirith army would not be complete without a bunch of these guys.  So far, we got 27 regular troops and 2 captains.  I still have a bunch more to do, and I'll hopefully get to them in the next few days.

Gondor Pt 4 (WIP)

So here are a few WIP (work in progress) pictures I took of my Men of Minas Tirith earlier in the week to show some of my progression.  I have around 25 done so far.

.

I have a pretty good system set up where I take care of the armor first, then I pin them to they're bases.  I'm going pretty strong and I'm hoping to have a sizable force of these particular models done before March 1st.

Gondor Pt 3

So its been a few days since I posted any new hobby stuff.  This is partially due to the release of the new expansion for Skyrim, Dragonborn.  Like I've mentioned in the past, I'm a huge gamer, especially when it comes to computer RPG's, and I can literally play an entire day in Skyrim without even realizing it.

This weekend though, I managed to get my first warband of Minas Tirith done.  I must admit, I really didn't enjoy painting these guys.  I think its due to the fact that painting figures that all look alike is rather boring.  I also had some issues with pinning them to my custom bases due to my inexperienced.  Anyways, here they are....

 

The group with the captain

Top view of group with the captain

Captain of Minis Tirith

Overall, I think they turned out pretty good, considering they had been stripped and repainted.  I think I'll do another 2 warbands of these guys, probably with less archers since I have a bunch of rangers that are far better with bows than these guys.  I also want to get to boxes of Gondor cavalry to round out of the force along with King Aragorn as my heavy hitter.

Saturday's Game (2-2-13)

So this past Saturday I got to play 2 games over at UGG which was a lot of fun.  I also got to bust out my Watcher in the Water model which I haven't gotten the pleasure to field.

 

First game up was Moria vs. Rohan.  I was a little hesitant to field a bunch of goblins since I've seem them get crushed multiple times on my Mines of Moria board vs. the fellowship.  At first, it looked like I was just going to get crushed until The Watcher of the Deep showed up and basically annihilated the left side of the board.   The Dweller of the Deep looked like he was going to fall (had 1 wound left) until I got a lucky roll, grabbing one of the riders of Rohan off his horse and throwing him into Erkenbrand and a few other horsemen, basically getting all his wounds back in one go.  I think we ended up calling it in my favor after he was nearly routed.

Second Game was a quickie, playing my Isengard army vs. 4 Ents and Ghan-buri-gha.  For awhile, it seemed like a bowling game, with my Uruks being flung left and right.  After the captains got in there, I was able to get a few wounds in thanks to the new rule Epic Strike.  In the end, the Uruks were able to cut the trees down, winning by routing.

And in the spirit of cutting trees down, I decided to bust out my pack of citadel trees so I have some dead trees to go along with the Gothic Ruins I recently did.

Gothic Ruins 3 (Finished!!)

So I finally finished the Gothic Ruins building.  It took me a little longer than anticipated due to the fact that I started adding details and it was really my first time painting balsa wood, so I wanted to get a good feel for it.  Plus, I decided to spread the work out and say "It gets done when it gets done.  Its not a race, its a hobby".  So anyhew, this post is going to be a bit more picture heavy than normal.  Without any further delay... the finished Gothic Ruins.

So the first two pictures are just the overview of the ruins themselves.  After all was said in done, the widths are 1' by 1' and its just under 7" tall.

 

 Here are some close up shots of some of the details.  After I had primed and painted it, it looked a little bland.  I wanted this piece of terrain to be used in multiple skirmish games (LOTR:SBG and Mordheim mostly), and after viewing some of the terrain people other people had done for they're Mordheim games, I've noticed its the little details that really pop out.  Since Mordheim is the "City of Damned" after getting hit with a comet, the terrain needs to have that "hint of death" to it.  So, I added a few skulls here and there and a few broken swords, axes, and war hammers to give it more character.  I think these little details definitely add alot to the piece.

After I had done the bulk of the work, I was looking at the piece and I wondered "How would guys be able to get up to the second level and move from one side of the building to the other.  I have a lot of balsa wood laying around from one of my scratch built buildings I've yet to complete still, so I decided to make a little catwalk.  After cutting it out and gluing it together, I cut the sharp edges and scored it with my knife to give it a more "worn" look.  After doing that, I remember looking at other project involving balsa wood being used for planking and I really liked the idea of putting something like nails protruding from where the boards were hammered together.  I've seen where people just put a blob of green stuff, then painting it silver and calling it a day, but I wanted a more "authentic" look to it.  I decided to take a paperclip (2 to be exact) and shoved them thru the two pieces of wood then snipping it like 2mm above where it was sticking out of the wood.  I really liked this effect, and wanted to give it a paint job that really made the wood stand out, opting for dark warm brown and tan tones.

Now the second problem I faced was how the hell were guys going to get up to the second levels?  I toyed with idea of carving a ladder out of balsa, but wanted something a little different plus I want the bottom to feel like a bigger open space for battle.  I opted to have a rope hastily tied to one of the cut off beams.  Problem was is I didn't have any authentic looking rope material to use.  I had some lightweight gauge wire laying around, so I cut 5 pieces of the same length, twisted them together, used a ton of superglue to fix it to the bottom of the beam (out of sight), and let it cure overnight.  After it cured, I painted where the glob of superglue was the same color as the plank, wrapped the wire around the plank, primed it black, and painted it mid to light tone tan colors.  I think both the catwalk and the rope turned out fantastic.

Now here is a few shots of some minis on it to give a sense of the scale.

Aragorn fights a vicious morannon orc on the the catwalk while the battle is joined below by a small band of dwarf rangers

The dwaves engage the menacing foes

The struggle on the catwalk continues

nevermind the half painted Goblin King in the background, hes just chilling while he waits for more paint

Overall, this project was alot of fun and now I think I'm ready to tackle my scratch built Mordheim building I started 6 months ago but lost interest 30% into it.  Its been sitting on my shelf in my living room as a reminder that I still have a lot of work to do on it.  I eventually want to have a full 4' x 4' ruined city board to play Mordheim on.  I also think it can dual purpose for a game of LOTR:SBG since I'm a big fan of lots of terrain being on the board for any table top wargame.  Part of the reason I love this hobby is creating awesome looking terrain which is a whole different animal than painting miniatures, with different styles and techniques.  We'll see where we go from here.

Gothic Ruins 2

So I started making the base for the set of gothic ruins I painted up last night.  I'm running out of hardboard, so I'm probably going to have to pick some up after the next set of terrain items I make.  Instead of using 4mm thick plasticard to make the tiles, I just used some heavy cardstock, more specifically remnants from the box of a 12 pack of coke cans.

 

I actually just ended up super gluing them to the cardboard after I traced where the building was going to sit.  If I was to do this with plasticard, I would still be cutting them out and carving them.  I'm interested in seeing how this effect works.

To add some more detail to the base, I glued plumbers sand around the edges, and added pieces of old sprue to give the building a more dilapidated look.  I also glued some bit of sand, course basing material, and sprue to the tiles themselves to add a bit more texture to it.

 It probably doesn't look like much right now, but after it gets painted, I think it'll turn it pretty good.  I'm going to let it dry overnight since I used PVA glue for most of the sand.  Hopefully I'll start painting it up tomorrow.  In the meantime, I'll probably spend the rest of the night working on my Men of Minas Tirith.