A few Grey Wizards and progress on the Uruk-hai Pikemen

I spent these past two weeks mainly on the remaining Uruk-hai Warriors but I managed to sneak some Gandalf miniatures in to save my sanity!

Pict 899: A Gaggle of Gandalfs

Pict 900: Gandalf

Pict 901: Gandalf

First up are the only models I actually finished: The four Gandalfs I still had lying around – and in one fell swoop I doubled the different Gandalf miniatures I painted. I very much enjoyed layering the different greys and give the miniature likenesses of Ian McKellen a good try. Mostly this went well but especially the sculpt on the right with the hat posed some difficulties. And of course there is that plastic Gandalf from the Mines of Moria starter box - pretty much the worst sculpt of Gandalf GW produced. Luckily, I painted him now with the other three so that I actually did it.

Pict 902: Uruk-hai Warriors (WIP)

And here is my progress with the Uruk-hai. I finished the base colours and put down the washes but the punted the issue of starting the highlights. I now will have to break the group up into smaller, more managable chunks because otherwise I'll never get them done.

Picking up a few things throughout Middle-earth

I used the past two weeks to pick up a few projects and finishing others with a focus on Middle-earth. I managed to paint Eorl and a few Warriors for my Rohan army, the Moria Goblins of a few weeks back as well as some more heroes. I also painted two more models for D&D and started on a few more.

Pict 859: Rohan vs. Moria

Pict 860: Grôblog and Armoured Moria Goblins

Pict 861: Grôblog and Armoured Moria Goblins

First up are the armoured Moria Goblins. I really like the models - the mail coifs are an element that didn't extend towards the plastic goblins and makes these stand out.
With Grôblog, the guy with the tactical dwarven ruin, I particularly enjoyed painting the flowing cloak. But as is tradition with finecast, before priming I had to carve out the detail on the pillar because it was to washed out. I was very pleased however how the whole batch turned out and what was at first meant to be a small group to be played as hobgoblins in D&D might now get turned into an army? I already stripped the paint of about 70 plastic goblins, so that might be a reality...

Pict 862: Eorl, Warriors of Rohan with Horn and Banner

Pict 863: Eorl, Warriors of Rohan with Horn and Banner

After having painted Eorl on foot, of course I had to paint him on horseback as well. Intrestingly GW painted their version with a brown horse while Felaróf is clearly described as white. So that's what I went with. I also painted two more warriors - a bannerbearer and a hornblower. The banner will surely see play while the horn is a bit on the expensive site pointswise.

Pict 864: Gildor Inglorion, Gandalf the White, Aragorn

Pict 865: Gildor Inglorion, Gandalf the White, Aragorn

I then pulled out some more Middle-earth heroes from various armies and simply painted what took my fancy. The three poses of Aragorn were painted at the same time and now put me at nine painted Aragorns - only five more left to go and I painted all of the official poses that GW put out!
Of Gandalf I also showed a WIP. I'm not perfectly happy with the eyes, they are sculpted to be rather small on the model and now he looks a bit surprised. But after several tries, that what I ended up with. Gildor Inglrion was painted with the scenarios of the Fellowship Journeybook in mind. The colourscheme combines elements of my Highelf and Woodelf miniatures, since he's able to include the latter in his warband.

Pict 866: Dragonborn Rogue, Halfling Ranger

Pict 867: Dragonborn Rogue, Halfling Ranger

And to make a few steps outside the Legendarium, I finished up this Dragonborn Rogue and afterwards painted this Halfling Ranger. Once again, the miniatures are made by Darksword and a joy to paint!

Pict 868: Morgul Stalker (WIP)

And lastly here is a WIP of some Morgul Stalkers that I just started. The miniatures are a bit comical but I like the design choice to have spiky hoods and gauntlets. The faces with the big teeth just scream for a skull-motive face paint. I'll see what I can do!

Building an Uruk-Hai Army like it's 2001

These past two weeks again were spent painting (among other things) Uruk Scouts. With this last batch, I'm ready to call the scout army done for the moment. I then went on to paint up a few more Rohan heroes.

Pict 853: Uruk-Hai Scout Army 2020

Pict 854: Uruk-Hai Scouts and Ballista Loader

I really like how this army looks once put together like this. I painted three more bowmen to bring my total up to twelve and another twelve Scouts with shields for a total of nineteen. I will have to add in one box of the plastic Scouts at some point but for now I'm happy to have painted a bunch on models from almost 20 years ago. I think that the next step will be Mordor Orcs from that time to be able to mix them in for some spear supports.
Whilst acquiring the Scouts, I also got a second Ballista loader and proceeded to paint him alongside the Scouts. He might simply get used as a pikeman once the opportunity arises.

Pict 855: Mauhur (Conversion)

To upgrade the Scouts to marauders, I had to get myself a Mauhur. There once was a metal miniature for him but nowadays he's only availiable in Finecast. Since the rest of the army is metal that surely was not an option so I had to go about converting one. Mauhur is pretty much only a Scout with two swords and a cape and thus it was easy enough: The main body is just one of the runing Scouts, the right hand was missing in this case, so that Lurtz had to donate one. The right arm and shoulder are from another Lurtz, this time the one just holding his bow. And lasty the sword in the left hand comes from Uglúk. I'm pretty happy with how he turned out and of course I like him better than the original model now!

Pict 856: Haleth, Aldor, Eorl

Pict 857: Haleth, Aldor, Eorl

To have some more opponents for my Uruks I then swiched over to more Rohan heroes. First up were Aldor and Haleth - two of the newer models made by ForgeWorld. They painted up reasanobly quickly since they are pretty much Rohan Warriors with a little extra. I guess they will really shine in a Defense of Helm's Deep army and I just might have to write up a list to try them out.
I also wanted to try out the new Helm Hammerhand profile and because my ForgeWorld order had not yet arrived I decided to prox him with a different legenday king of Rohan: Eorl, the guy who started the whole thing. It's a good thing that I did because I don't think I'd paint him anytime soon otherwise. The pose is quite nice but the face seems to be a victim of casting issues rather often. It went ok, but I had to guess where the eyes on the model were rathern than having them modeled on there. Next up will have to be the Eorl mounted and of course Helm himself!

Pict 858: Gandalf the White (WIP)

And lastly here's a WIP. I never acually painted any Gandalf the White miniatures. When I started playing he was simply to expensive (it's got nothing to do with me being unable to use magic effectively!). But now that I'm spending some more time in Rohan, he jumped to the top of the queue. I went for a grey cloak to mimic the scene of him coming into the hall of Meduseld but not wuite having revealed himself.

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.

Balin's Tomb Diorama - finished!

So I finally managed to finish the Battle Games in Middle Earth Diorama for the original Fellowship miniatures.

Pict 483: The Chamber of Mazarbul

Pict 484: Balin's Tomb Diorama

Pict 485: Balin's Tomb Diorama

Pict 486: Balin's Tomb Diorama

Pict 487: Ori, the Book of Mazarbul and Balin's Tomb

I had this diorama for quite some time now and I already started to paint it for almost as long. Now that I had gotten around to the Fellowship miniatures the diorama base jumped right ahead to the front of my paint queue. One of the challanges was the GW logo in the back. It is scuplted roughly like the current one but to get all the colours and lines right I had to have one ready to compare. It was a strange experience - that logo is one I looked at almost every single day for years, but I never even noticed the strange font. It's rather whimsical with round 'e' and the 'm' and 'w' with their swelling lines. My paintjob of the logo is not perfect but it'll have to do.

Pict 488: Termagants

After finishing something for the ME SBG I wanted to get back to 40k and finished these five snap-fit Termagants. As always I'm really happy how the carapace looks once the second set of red stripes are on. Now there are only 30 more to go!

Pict 489: Termagants (WIP)

And here is a quick WIP of my progess with the rest of the Tyranid project. I started with the black parts on these nine Termagants and added a few washes and spot colours. The black always takes the longest so that I had to break the pile of Gants up into smaller groupings.

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.

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...).