LOTR: Mounted Citadel Guard & Beregond

   I haven't felt that I have had any 'finished' things to show off for getting on for a year.  Even though I don't currently have any opponents for Lord of the Rings, my fondness for the game and its models has not abated.  Now that Games Workshop is Under New Management and has really made an effort to unite, balance and reinvigorate the Middle Earth range I have found the lure of it irresistible.  

  Unfortunately, there are still many, many gaps in the official model range, including discontinued and Out Of Print models, alongside ones that never got an official release to cover the options available in the rules.  3rd party suppliers have tried to fill the odd gap, with mixed results.  These three models are by Unreleased Miniatures, and were the very devil to put together, with big gaps needing lots of green stuff to fill in and smooth over.  They weren't cheap, either, but I am glad I've given them a go.

  The bases are from Dragon Forge, and I used brass rod to pin the pewter models to them.  There was an unfortunate incident involving the squished looking one on the right hand side, and eventually the back legs will tear / snap.  When that happens I'll have to re-pin and re-paint bits of it but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!

  I used a Dheneb Stone equivalent from Instar paints for the stone of the base, washed it with Agrax Earthshade, then drybrushed Ulthuan Grey.  I tried various colours around the edge of the base to emphasise the pale stone but none of them worked so I just went right back to Chaos / Abaddon Black which I think works best.

  Next, I am going to work on the official GW models of these figures dismounted!

Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Sometimes I should just leave well enough alone.

A second attempt at spraying my LOTR chaps, this time with a pale grey, ended up with horrible "frosting" across much of them.  This was an attempt to "fix" the initial grey paint which I felt wouldn't stick as a primer.

So - a month of off and on paint stripping, regluing, rebasing etc. began.

However, whilst that's been going on, some packages have arrived and I have been busy prepping some new models.  A mix of Unreleased Miniatures models and Games Workshop ones now make up my army, with some bases from Dragon Forge and Micro Art Studios.  Now they are finally "ready", if unpainted, it feels good to say there is some visible progress!

I love the Kingdoms of Men generally and like the idea of allied forces from different regions. My main desire was for Fiefdoms with Minas Tirith allies. Frustratingly a lot of hero and even troop models are OOP so I've had to be patient on eBay.

I am hoping that with Games Workshop re-investing in Middle Earth as a setting in 2018 there will be opportunities for new models or re-releases of older ones as time goes on.

Autumn Beckons

Summer ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper!
 
I just realised that I haven't posted in a couple of months - mostly because I have ground to a halt, hobby-wise!  I got most of the way through an Empire Knight unit for Warmaster and thought it looked superb.  Here's the finished test strip with a coin for scale.

Alas, I burned myself out and felt I must do something different, having spent so long doing nothing but Warmaster.

Then an unfortunate thing happened - I got excited about another army and game system!

So I have been on eBay and on the GW webstore and have some lovely Lord of the Rings armies of Good - namely "Fiefdoms" and Gondor.  Essentially, Fiefdoms is a catch all for allies of Gondor - including all the things mentioned in the books that didn't even get a nod from Peter Jackson in the films.

I love the idea of having a pool of troops to make a small army or warband in a similar scale to a SAGA battle but with fantasy elements.  LOTR focuses less on units but rather each individual model and it's placement and luck in combat is important, with different elements able to support one another.

I splashed out on nice resin bases from Mico Art Studios and faffed about basing them and prepping them, then the first thing I did was make a huge cock up!

I went to undercoat them with this grey spray paint I got from GW.

Well, apparently, the non black and white colours that GW have are not actually primers like the ones from rival companies are.

They are still meant to be sprayed over primer.

So now I have 10 infantry and 6 cavalry which look OK to the naked eye but I'm googling and getting mixed answers from people who say it will peel and others saying it's fine.  After leaving it for a day the paint did not scrape off even when scratching my nail across it.  My current thinking is that - I can't be bothered properly stripping all these fellas, so I'll only strip the metal models as metal chips so easily.

Then I'm going to buy an Army Painter white and blast them all with that.  When I finish painting models I always paint on Vallejo Matt Varnish in a few coats, so I'm hoping that will be good enough to secure against my indiscretion.

Always read the fine print, kids!