Hopefully I'll be back with some finished Uruks around the 10th April he said...
So, 3 weeks later I have an update, sorry for the delay but as I mentioned I'm not exactly the fastest painter in the world.
So I got the 10 uruks finished and based a while back.
Shields:
Pikes:
And here's my stage by stage guy finished:
So after the Badab Black wash, all the colours have just been reapplied for the highlights, Dark Flesh for the skin, Bestial Brown for the straps and belts and Steel Legion Drab for the loincloth, gloves and socks. The base then has a mixture of sand and course gravel glued on, painted Scorched Brown and then Drybrushed Bestial Brown and Ushabti Bone. Finally the rim is painted Bestial Brown and Scorched Grass is glued on.
I know these guys are fairly dull and boring but I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out; I was particularly pleased with them as plastic Uruk Hai warriors were actually the very first LOTR models I painted about 2 and a half years ago when I got back into the hobby (I played Warhammer from the age of about 10-20 and then had 10 years out). Whilst I was happy with those models at the time it's really nice to see how much better these are, I've included a front and back of the same miniature form those early models below:
The differences are fairly subtle but the introduction of Steel Legion Drab, the replacement of Mithril Slver with Chainmail, the addition of some course gravel to the base and the use of Scorched Grass instead of Glade Grass all go a long way (IMO) to making the new models look vastly better than the old ones.
So, after that I was due to move on to 11 Uruk Crossbowmen, despite buying a load of the new Hobbit box sets, I have so far stayed strong and resisted the temptation to paint anything from the Hobbit range in favour of clearing my backlog. However, after having a think about army lists for some upcoming tournaments I decided I really wanted to use and paint some eagles.
I was slightly apprehensive about diving into the gorgeous Hobbit eagle models without any practice so, during a recent visit to my parent's house, I had a dig around in some dusty old boxes and found a couple of really badly painted Wood Elf/High Elf eagles (that are remarkably still available on the website for £11). They were painted by a friend of mine about 15 years ago who left me his army when he lost interest in the hobby and I thought they'd be good to practice on.
I threw them in a bath of nasty Poundland nail varnish remover and 48 hours later a quick scrub with a toothbrush got rid of most of the paint reasonably well:
It's interesting seeing how it worked better on some areas than others despite being painted in the same paints and being submerged for the same length of time. A bit of liquid greenstuff to cover some gaps and a quick spray undercoat and we were off.
My plan was to try different combinations of drybrushing/washing etc. on each eagle to hopefully come up with the best result before I started on the Hobbit eagles.
Annoyingly, I ran into my first frustration with the new paint range during the process when my Scorched Brown ran out. In the picture below the bottom eagle has been drybrushed with Scorched Brown whilst the top one has been drybrushed with the 'replacement' Rhinox Hide.
As you can see, Scorched Brown was far redder than its replacement and they are very different colours. I'm quite lucky in that generally I only use Scorched for spear hafts and belts etc. so nothing hugely important but if it was a key army colour this would be quite an issue. As it turned out I actually prefer the Rhinox Hide colour as it provides a much darker brown that was missing from the range, it would have been nice to have a true replacement for Scorched though.
So without too much effort I was able to finish these guys off over the last week
I'm pretty pleased with them overall, they're obviously a fair bit smaller than the Hobbit ones and they look a bit dated now but they should fit in fairly well and work as baby eagles
I don't think I'll use exactly the same colour scheme for my Hobbit eagles but it's been good to experiment.
As an aside it was really fun painting these as I'd painted up 2 of them for my Warhammer Wood Elf army when they were first released around 1997 so it was a very strange feeling painting the same figures 15 years later!
So, I'm very excited about the next batch as I finally get to paint some of the shiny new Hobbit minis. I'm currently undecided whether to paint the lovely new Hobbit eagles (Which at £12.50 a pop from Green Dragon are actually pretty reasonably priced) or Radagast to lead them, decisions decisions...
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) but they all look awesome nevertheless!
