Continuing the Iyanden Eldar

Continuing to catch up on a few more projects, I finished painting the plastic contingent of Aeronautica planes for my Iyanden Eldar. But of course there is even more stuff to this project! I also worked on some more bits for the Aeronautica Space Marines as well as some High Elves from Middle-earth.

Pict 1731: Aeronautica Imperialis Iyanden Eldar Phoenix Bombers, Nightwings

The remaining plastic aircraft painted up quite fast. Even with the main yellow colour requiring several passes of glaze for me to be happy with. Again, I am blown away by the detail the designers put into these small miniatures.

Pict 1732: Aeronautica Imperialis Iyanden Eldar Ground Assets and Vampires (WIP)

Pict 1733: Aeronautica Imperialis Iyanden Eldar Bases (WIP)

Speaking of aircraft – turnes out the Vampires are huge! They will be the capstone to the project alongside the official ground assets and targets. I also build two more targets from some Eldar bits and a push mold of the Webway Gate's base plate to have enough to play the missions from the Companion booklet.
Also, as you might have seen with the first few pictures, I started to work on the hexagonal bases for the Eldar. I'm not to sure of the colours (the brown parts are the basis for a red gradient) but we'll see how they turn out.

Pict 1734: Aeronautica Imperialis Blood Angels Ground Assets (WIP)

Once I have finished the Eldar, I will want to go back to the Space Marines. Sticking some additional Tacticals on these bases only occured to me after basecoating but I think they should paint up fine nonetheless. Besides these Ground Assets there are still three more Xiphons waiting for a coat of paint. I could build two more targets as well, but I think I will simply use the Forward Operating bases from last year.

Pict 1735: Glorfindel, High Elf Banner Bearer and Elrond (WIP)

Lastly there are even more High Elves for the Rivendell army: The plastic Elrond and his banner bearer as well as the beautiful ForgeWorld Glorfindel. I don't really need them to play the army since I already painted versions of both characters. And I'm really happy to paint these amazing miniatures now that I am really comfortable with the colour scheme and potential short cuts I did not know about at the start of the year.

Elrond, Master of Rivendell

Only a few more miniatures finished this time around, among them Elrond mounted and ready to lead the Rivendell Knights into battle.

Pict 1704: Elrond, Master of Rivendell

Pict 1705: Elrond, Master of Rivendell

Of course, I started out by finishing up Elrond. The lure of cool heroes will always be stronger than the necessity to paint the warriors to follow them. I did struggle a bit with the finecast sculpt. Some of the details around the face and the folds at the hem of the cloak were muddy or even obscured. Nevertheless, I'm happy enough with the result. But I'm really looking forward to painting the new plastic model now!

Pict 1706: Rivendell Knight

Pict 1707: Rivendell Knights (WIP)

I only managed to finish one of the Rivendell Knights in time for this update. But the other four of this batch are not far of as well. It should really only take a few more evenings, but I was distracted by other fun stuff...

Pict 1708: Bilbo Baggins, Ageing Hobbit

Pict 1709: Bilbo Baggins, Ageing Hobbit

While he will certainly not be able to keep up with the Rivendell cavalry, Bilbo Baggins, Ageing Hobbit should make for a fun addition to the army. He is quite useful with his use of the One Ring, halving any enemies Fight value, even when in combat with other friendly models. That would make quite the tag team with Glorfindel or even Elrond.
In any case, painting this little miniature was great fun! Such a beautiful sculpt and a perfect tribute to Ian Holm. I had done the base for the clear resin version quite a while ago and sadly the resin has yellowed over time. I only added a few birch seed as leaves onto it and will still use it in game.

Pict 1710: Aeronautica Imperialis Iyanden Eldar Nightwing

Pict 1711: Aeronautica Imperialis Iyanden Eldar Nightwing

It seems I can never only have on project on the go at once. So I also started with the Aeronautica Imperialis Eldar that came with the Wrath of Angels box that kickstarted my Blood Angels flyers. I always liked the colours of Craftworld Iyanden, maybe because I learned about them first whilst reading the Tyranid Codex. Of course, the yellow is not the easiest to paint, but I'm quite happy with my plan. The first test flyer is done and the rest of the fleet is waiting for their basecolours. I'm especially happy with the magnetic connetion between plane and flight stand. I might have to go back and do the same for my Astartes flyers.

Pict 1712: Legions Imperialis Blood Angels Rhinos (WIP)

And while prepping for a match of LI, I also slapped some quick base colours and decals on my Rhinos. Thirteen of them are built and marked for use with the Tactical Strike Force iconic formation. The fourteenth one was left over and might see use when I go for other formations.

The Butterfly's Tally 2018

As I said last week, this will be a post to take a look back at 2018 and make some resolutions for this coming year. In between, I'll show what I got done in this first week of January

Pict 556: Tally 2018 - Tyranids

The Year in Review

Pict 557: Tally 2018 - Iron Hills

Pict 558: Tally 2018 - Hunter Orcs

First I want to look at my resolutions for 2018 again: I wanted to paint more Tyranids (check, but there are still some in a box...), Iron Hills Dwarves (check), Hunter Orcs (check even though it took pretty much the whole year), the Balin's Tomb Diorama (check) and the White Council in Dol Guldur Diorama (check), as well as a Shire force for Battle Companies (nope, but I did Arnor instead).

Pict 559: Tally 2018 - The White Council

Pict 560: Tally 2018 - Balin's Tomb

As you can see in the panel on the right, in the end I painted 232 models versus the 238 I bought. With that I added slightly to the pile of shame but I also managed to sell/give away quite a few. I didn't keep a tally on how far along the painting process any of these miniatures were, but I managed to get rid of 192 miniatures and thus reduced my pile considerably!

Pict 561: Tally 2018 - Arnor

With 45 posts over the year, I missed a few more weeks than the year before. Sometimes I just didn't have the time to paint during the week; others I missed because I was out of town and hadn't prepared a post. Still, I'm happy with the 45 posts as it is!

Pict 562: Tally 2018 - Illithid Raiding Party

Pict 563: Tally 2018 - Twilight Ringwraiths

Other than that here are some of my favourite projects of this year. Looking back through my posts, I really liked the Illithid Raiding Party, the Twilight Ringwraiths, Zuggtmoy and of course the add-on to my mounted Rohan army to make it ready for the new edition of the game.

Pict 564: Tally 2018 - Zuggtmoy

Pict 565: Tally 2018 - Rohan Army Additions

This Week's Painting

Pict 566: Rangers of the North (WIP)

This week however I only managed to get a bit further along with the Rangers of the North. Now the base colours are all down and the washes are dry. With only the highlighting left to do, I hope to have them done next week. I also added in two miniatures of Aragorn in similar clothes. And since I plan on using him with the others, I also changed his usual scheme and gave one of them the black livery my other Arnorians have.

Plans for the Future

Lastly I want to make a few plans for this year and write up my new year's resolutions for 2019. I want to continue with the Middle-Earth miniatures and right now, I'm most excited about the new miniatures I showed before priming a few weeks back. One thing I'm really missing however is an evil army from the Lord of the Rings era. To remedy that I collected Easterlings and Khandish Warriors. Beyond that, I feel that I painted very little for other systems other than the Middle-Earth SBG and I want to change that by doing the Haqqislam and more heroes and monsters for D&D. Both should challenge me the former because it's clean Sci-Fi and the latter by being very divers. And lastly there are those Ruins of Osgiliath still waiting in a box unser my table...

Pict 567: Haqqislam, Khand, Rhûn, Rivendell (WIP)

So, all in all here are my resolutions: I will paint an all mounted Rivendell army with dismounts, an army of evil men from Rhûn and Khand, at least 20 miniatures for D&D, my set of Osgiliath-Ruins and my Haqqislam army for Infinity. At the end of the year I want to have bought less miniatures than I painted and I will also attempt to paint a total of 365. We'll see if I can make it this year!
As for the blog itself: Since I missed some weeks, esspecially towards the end of the year, I'll change my posting shedule to every other week. Other than that I plan to go ahead as before with pictures of my painted miniatures and of the ones that stand unfinished on my table.

Dol Guldur Diorama - finished!

This week was slow again - the real life seems to take over these last few ones... But at least I managed to work on Galadriel, Lady of Light.

Pict 429: Dol Guldur Diorama

Pict 430: Galadriel, Lady of Light

Pict 431: Galadriel, Lady of Light

I find her to be the weakest of the scuplts from the Vanquishers of the Necromancer set and thus postponed her from week to week. On top of that I had my difficulties with the dress - for one thing it's not all to clear what is flash or residue of the casting process, for anonther I was not to fond of the swamp-like design of the scene in the movie. I finally decided to go for a more colourful aproach with blue and green layers to her clothes. It's inspired by the colours in the scene but not as dark.

Pict 432: Dol Guldur Diorama

Pict 433: Dol Guldur Diorama

As you can see in the first picture, with Galadriel finished, I completed another of my new years pledges: The Dol Guldur Dioama. I'm quite happy to have it done and it will shurely stay on my shelf of the forseeable future. To stay within the scene of the movie, I had Radagast on his sleigh prepared and partly painted for some time. But after painting the Necromancer, I will have to paint the Dol Guldur Nazgul as well. But that will have to wait a bit - at least coming week I will probably wont have any time to paint.

Heroes, Dúnedain and Scenery

Lately the Arnor Battle Company is really the main project and I managed to make a good start on the Dúnedain. I also completed two more heroes of Middle Earth, but the main part of my hobby time this week was spent building miniatures from Gale Force 9's line of Dungeons and Dragons miniatures.

Pict 381: Elrond and Aragorn

Pict 382: Elrond, Lord of Rivendell

Pict 383: Elrond, Lord of Rivendell

First up, I painted the next Elrond. This Lord of Rivendell's likeness to Hugo Weaving is not quite as good as the armoured one I paintet last week, but I very much enjoyed the robes of this particular miniature. There is now not that much infantry left for me to paint for the Noldorim army. After that I will have to bite the bullet and get on with the horses of the Rivendell Knights.

Pict 384: Aragorn (Fellowship)

Pict 385: Aragorn (Fellowship)

To start painting some other colours than the ones I use with the Noldorim and the Arnor Warriors I painted this Aragorn. I really like the poses of the first Fellowship box set and they are part of my new year's resolutions as I wanted to finish the Balin's Tomb diorama.

Pict 386: Witchfate Tor, Tower of Sorcery

Pict 387: Witchfate Tor, Tower of Sorcery

Pict 388: Witchfate Tor, Tower of Sorcery

Pict 389: Witchfate Tor, Tower of Sorcery

I also painted up this first storey of a Witchfate Tor. I had this piece of scenery in a half-painted state for about four to five years now and I decided to finish it. I want to use it in a D&D game and hope this will be an incentive to get to the other layers of the tower. But I also want to paint up some more monsters and villans for the next sessions...

Pict 390: Dúnedain (WIP)

These Dúnedain will be the Rangers of my Arnor force and I hope to finish them up fast during the coming week. I made good progress and they have now had their base colours and washed put on them. As you can see, I have one of all of the six poses GW and I converted the others to have some more unique ones.

More from the Eriador Alliance of Arnor and Noldor

This week was rather productive and I managed to finish the Arnor Warriors as well as some more Highelves.

Pict 375: The Eriador Alliance

Pict 376: Arnor Warriors

I'm rather happy to have these Arnor Warriors finished and off my desk after they stood ther for about two weeks. Now that they are done, I'll have to get to some Rangers and Hobbit Archers to round out the rest of the company.

Pict 377: Elrond, Gil-Galad, Glorfindel

Pict 378: Elrond, Gil-Galad, Glorfindel

After I painted the Highelf Captain last week, I had a taste for more of them and started work on more heroes. I really like this particular sculpt for Elrond  - the face is a great rendition of Hugo Weaving. Gil-Galad is nice as well but Glorfindel's face was somewhat difficult to do... It always looked like he had a mustache - and that's clearly nothing a great elven hero has.

Pict 379: Elladan, Elrohir

Now that I painted Elrond a few times, I also had to finish his two sons. I got the miniatures just last year from a friend and thus the didn't even wait that long for the paintjob. The poses are a little strange but they are good enough. I haven't used them befor in the game and only played them once or twice but they seem really good on paper. They are not quite finished though as they are missing the leaves I usually put on the bases as well as the victory lap around the rim of the base.

Pict 380: Highelf Warriors

I painted these two Noldor Warriors during the same stretch, I painted Elrond's twins (as you can see by the state of the base). They both use the banner bearer as a base and both are coverted is simple ways. I turned the banner, because it seemed weird, flowing over his head. That might be the years of looking at Warhammer Fantasy banners that conditioned me to always have the banner point behind the miniature? The other one will be part of my battle company as a normal warrior for now - I used part of a plastic Elvenblade to equip him with one and scraped the bottom end of the bannerpole away to make it work. I really like the resulting pose and think about getting mre of them to repeat the conversion.

Almost finished the Dol Guldur Diorama + Battle Companies

Pict 336: The White Council at Dol Guldur (WIP)

This week I made a foray into fulfilling my new year's resolutions and painted Elrond and Saruman for my Dol Guldur Diorama. Other than that, I contiued with the conversions and the painting for my battle companies.

Pict 337: Elrond, Vanquisher of the Necromancer

Pict 338: Elrond, Vanquisher of the Necromancer

Pict 339: Sauruman, Vanquisher of the Necromancer

Pict 340: Sauruman, Vanquisher of the Necromancer

As part of the Rivendell miniatures this week, I also finally finished Elrond, Vanquisher of the Necromancer. I do like the pose, but I think he could use some more support to stick to his base. Additionally the Elven blade seems oddly short - I think were I to paint him again, I might change it.
Saruman's pose is very exaggerated, it's all right I think, but there are definitly better ones. After this one though I wont be touching a brush to one anytime soon, since painting the white robes was quite the drag. Now I'm only missing Galadriel to finish the diorama, but I did't have the heart to get going on her robes after Saruman's. I then might add some other miniatures to round out the scene - Radagast on sleigh comes to mind and of course the Keeper of the Dungeons.

Pict 341: Naal, Noldor Captain

Pict 342: Naal, Noldor Captain

Pict 343: Rivendell Objective Marker

Next up are the miniatures I painted for my Rivendell battle company. I already showed the conversion for my Sargent Naal last week and he was in fact layered and highlighted super fast. I cant wait to get him to a table and encounter new adventures.
The objective marker was made in case I on of my heroes will roll the "Lost in Battle" result on the injury table and I have to play the scenario to recover them. The miniature is from the Rivendell Knight kit and due to it's sizeable cape it didn't really fit on the base I wanted it to - with it's 50mm base now, it is a bit big for a normal objective.

Pict 344: Gundabad Orc Warrior (Conversion)

Pict 345: Gundabad Orc Warrior (Conversion)

And lastly here is my first Gundabad Orc Warrior. Right now he's still missing his shield because I didnät have one on hand. I converted the miniaure from a spare Troll Brute's driver by cutting of the right leg at the knee and hip as well as the head and the right arm. After pinning it back together in the pose I envisioned, I scuplted a new tabbard and filled the gaps with green stuff. The hands are both from the Gundabad Berserker kit - I only bent the sword with hot water.
I really enjoyed converting these last weeks, but I think the hobby time in the weeks to come will have to be focused on painting to get the different battle companies ready fot battle (and those Tyranids keep on looking at me from their place on the desk...).