I’M BACK! WOW! Over two months since I last posted in my WIP thread, crazy how time flies! In my defence I’ve officially had the two most stressful months of my life involving organising and going on a Stag Do, writing and performing a Best Man speech, marking a semester’s worth of student work and moving house! It’s been a crazy few weeks but it’s all settling down now and I’m trying to catch up with the more important things in life - namely the hobby!
I haven’t been completely idle over the last two months though, far from it in fact, I’ve attended 3 more GBHL tournaments and got a few figures done here and there so it’s time for a big post from Dr G!
Firstly thanks for all the kind words about the dwarves, I really appreciate it and am very happy with how they turned rout, I'm hoping to be adding to their ranks before too long!
First up is Thranduil, I actually painted him back in April but hadn’t done his base until a few days ago. Really pleased with how he turned out, spent a while pondering the colour scheme but once I settled I really enjoyed painting the model, lots of nice detail and it was a fun paint job. Really gorgeous sculpt, very impressed with Finecast on this occasion!
Next up came my Laketown Guard, again I started these guys back in April and then all the real world stuff pushed them to the back of the queue meaning that I only finished them off last week! All in all I suppose these models have taken me about 6 weeks!
I must say I really love these models and I’m relatively pleased with how they turned out but I really didn’t enjoy painting them at all. As you can hopefully see from my Mirkwood Rangers and Warriors of Erebor above, I’ve been trying to improve my painting standard for basic warriors this year, particularly on expensive finecast models like these. This meant that I was determined to spend time on them and keep them to the same standard and, whilst this might seem like a strange criticism, I just found there was a frustrating amount of detail on these models that I needed to pick out. It wasn’t helped by the fact that they were the last thing I painted for my Throne of Skulls army last week and so I was really up against it time wise and ‘had’ to finish them. I might well have enjoyed it more if I was painting them for pleasure rather than to hit a deadline. Either way, I’ve got another 7 of these to paint and I’m not particularly inspired to jump back in and get cracking on them! I certainly don't envy Jay Clare and his Herculean effort of painting 48 of the damn things! Still, like I said, I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out but they’re not my best work and I don’t have fond memories of painting them.
One of the cool things about Throne of Skulls was that both Good and Evil armies could get bonus Mirkwood Spiders to join their force on the Sunday DOS scenarios in Mirkwood. This was a great excuse to get some Mirkwood Spiders painted up as, whilst I wanted some at some point, they weren’t anywhere near the top of my priority list. I was kinda dreading cleaning up and assembling these fiddly Finecast models but I’m gonna stand up for the material again here, the spiders were a joy to put together, really easy and intuitive, the legs can only go in one possible configuration and, whilst they were easy to bend, they never felt like they were going to snap. I also wanted to do something a bit special with my spiders’ bases; as you may remember, about this time last year I painted up a couple of the new Hobbit eagles for Battle Brothers at Warhammer World. I’ve never been a big fan of the plastic flying stems and so I decided to put my eagles in burnt trees to represent the scene at the end of An Unexpected Journey (see page 2 of this WIP thread for pics) and I decided to do something similar with my spiders. I had already decided to create a rather ambitious display board for my Throne of Skulls army including a Mirkwood section and decided to incorporate my spiders into the base (they would, after all, be part of the army displayed on the base) and so to this end I decided to create a couple of full bloom Mirkwood trees to put the spiders on. I assembled the trees first and then, once the spiders were assembled, I worked out exactly where I wanted to place each spider before bending the legs to fit the tree. This was another example of how handy finecast was as I was easily able to bend the spiders’ legs into the right position using a little hot water. I decided to have one hanging from a tree via a web thread and one sitting in the tree. Once I’d sorted the poses out I took a load of screen grabs from DOS to get the colours right, this research showed that the Mirkwood spiders are actually a selection of browns rather than black and have some vivid designs on the tops of their bodies. This made them quite fun to paint up quickly and allowed me to move away from the slightly dull black GW scheme. Once they were done they were glued into the trees and I coated the brass rod holding the hanging spider in liquid greenstuff and painted it in greys and whites to look like web. Once the spiders were glued into the trees I added all the leaves onto the trees to create the canopy, deliberately putting lots of leaves at the top (where they would get the light) and very few lower down in the depths of Mirkwood where the evil of Dol Guldur had started to spread.
I had also decided to place Bilbo with his head sticking out of the trees to represent the scene in DOS when he climbs the trees and encounters the blue butterflies just before the spider attack. This had always been my intention and I painted the leaves in the autumnal colour scheme to recreate this moment. This also had the added bonus of forcing me to paint up my Escape from Goblin Town Bilbo who otherwise would have likely not seen a brush for years. As a final touch I decided to attempt to create the iconic blue butterflies, to do this I simply took a bunch of scenic leaves on a thread and dipped them into an old GW turquoise glaze. Once dry, I bent it up around the model and glued it to Bilbo’s base. The effect might look like a bunch of blue string and leaves up close but from a distance works really well and gives the butterfly effect I was after. I’d also deliberately used the plastic leaves to create a ‘nest’ for Bilbo to sit in in the tree so that when his base slots into the tree you can’t see it from the sides. I was really pleased with how this little vignette turned out, I loved the idea that the model looks sweet and innocent with Bilbo and the butterflies at the top but then as you move down the tree you find the spider and the danger lurking below, just like in the film!
Overall I must say I really love the way the spiders came out, they were good fun to put together and I think it’s nice to do something a bit special with monsters. They received a lot of compliments over the Throne of Skulls weekend with people often getting freaked out as they at first thought they were just trees and then jumped when they saw the gribblies hidden within!
Finally, as you’ve probably guessed by now (and seen glimpses of in the pictures) I made a big display board for my army. I took an entirely fluffy and themed Battle of Five Armies force along to Throne of Skulls and wanted to create a nice board to display it on. I’ve been nominated for Best Army at Warhammer World twice before but never quite managed to grab the elusive trophy. At the last Throne of Skulls event in February 2013 I decided that I would go all out at the next one and first conceived the idea of a board with Mirkwood, Erebor and Laketown all represented along with an army representing the Battle of Five Armies. And so it’s great to see that some 16 moths later my crazy ambition was realised. All in all, the board took me just under 4 weeks to complete, it was stressful, fun, tedious and exciting in equal measure but I’m so pleased with how the finished product, along with all the models displayed upon it, looks. More excitingly I was able to fulfil my ambition and win Best Army at Throne of Skulls, a very humbling achievement given the quality of the opposition so thanks to all who voted for me.
Hopefully in the next few weeks I’m going to write up a full WIP thread of how I made my board but for now here’s a few pics of the finished thing to give you an idea.
And that’s about everything I’ve been up to, with the incredibly stressful months behind me I’m now looking forward to my next few projects. First up I’m painting up Thrydan Wolfsbane for the East Grinstead event next weekend so I should hopefully have pics of him up sometime in the next fortnight, WIP below.
After Thrydan I’m not entirely sure, I fancy painting Beorn in bear form as well as a few more dwarves for my Erebor army, alongside all that I’m also hearing the call of some Hunter Orcs or Gundabad orcs to start my Azog’s Hunters force. All sorts of exciting stuff to come really, we’ll just have to see what takes my fancy from the GIANT BOX OF TOYS waiting to be painted. One thing’s for sure, the updates should hopefully become more regular again!
Sorry for the long post, had a lot to catch you all up on!
Until next time!
{ PORTAL }
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