Dr Grant's WIP [Forge World Ogres]

greendragon · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 5:57 pm

Really lovely painting there Dr Grant, keep it up!

Azog · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 6:35 pm

You are temping us - we all want to know hat you are up to ;-)

Dr Grant · **Joined:** Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:50 pm **Posts:** 1339

Afraid it's not Gandalf on an eagle Marsbar, although that would be a cool conversion at some point in the future!

So here's what I've been tinkering with - Radagast!

Yep, I finally get to assemble and paint my first Hobbit SBG model, really love this figure and it was great fun to put together. It was the first push-fit model I've assembled and it was a really good fit. Have to say GW have got a lot better at disguising their mould lines with these multipart kits too so the clean-up was a breeze - looking forward to painting him.

However, he's not the only Radagast coming to play. The army idea in my head is an all mounted Rohan force with Radagast and some eagles for magical protection and added OOOOOOMMMPPHHH and I don't want Raddy getting left behind so it's time to put him on a horsey!

Cue the following components:

A couple of hours of filing, cutting and sticking later and voila!

I'm really chuffed with how this turned out to be honest, it was a much easier conversion than I'd feared. I was really worried about making the robes match up but Radagast's cloak helped with this a great deal. The plastic Radagast mini is also a dream for converting. The fact that the head and beard are one separate piece is great, I don't know of any other bearded mini that would enable you to do such a clean head swap, again showing how far GW's plastics have come on.

As an aside I was also very impressed with the Finecast Gandalf on Shadowfax. My only finecast minis so far have been Groblog and the Moria Goblin commanders and I wasn't at all impressed. However this Gandalf cast was excellent and there were only two minor bubbles on the entire model that were easily corrected. It was also the first Finecast mini I've converted and I was terrified about cutting up such an expensive figure but I found the material really great to work with and far more conversion friendly than metal.

So yeah that's my Radagast conversion and I'm hoping to start painting him tonight, you can imagine how happy I was when I saw DMS pick Radagast for May's painting challenge, this guy will definitely be entering!

Hope you like the conversion, C&C welcome as always!

theavenger001 · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 7:18 pm

Great job on the conversion, it looks great! :yay:

Harfoot · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 7:25 pm

Nice one good Doctor., very nice indeed. Look forward to following this one. Regular updates please.

Crucium Giger · **Posted:** Fri May 03, 2013 11:14 am

Excellent conversion and I can't wait to see it painted up.

Dorthonion · **Posted:** Fri May 03, 2013 11:32 am

The Rhosgobel Rider is a fantastic conversion - very neatly done. In keeping with Radagast's speciality in animal magic and his affinity with animals, the horse would have to be some relative of Shadowfax, another Mearas. So it would run like the clappers (maybe even faster than the bunny-sled? Dunno the rules on that as I have yet to purchase The Hobbit hardback rulebook).
Great work - maybe entering it in the next competition?

Oldman Willow · **Posted:** Fri May 03, 2013 12:08 pm

Outstanding conversion.

Dr Grant · **Joined:** Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:50 pm **Posts:** 1339

Thanks for all the kind comments guys, glad you like it. I'm hoping to start painting him tonight, just trying to figure out the colour scheme, don't want him to end up looking like a brown blob.

The same goes for the horse actually, the best horses I've done in the past have all been brown but I need a bit of contrast to make Raddy stand out. I'm thinking of going for a dark grey horse at the mo. Don't think I can really plan this one too well, just gonna get home and start throwing browns and greys around and see what happens!

Dr Grant · **Joined:** Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:50 pm **Posts:** 1339

Ahoy all, some progress! Sorry to disappoint Harfoot, I've hardly been posting regular updates! :-)

Well I've finished Raddy foot and mounted just in time to enter him into the painting challenge, I've put the mounted pics up in the painting challenge thread but figured it made sense to put 'em here too to chart my progress and all that jazz.

He took me far longer than I thought, about 3 weeks since my last post, but as I've mentioned before I don't get all that long to paint. It hasn't been helped that its been crazy busy at work (I'm a uni lecturer and the for the last 3 weeks I've been buried under a pile of marking) so I've had even less time than usual. This was then exacerbated by the fact that I spent longer on him because A) He's a character B) He's a conversion and C) I was entering him into the painting challenge.

Anyhoo, finally got him done and I'm pretty pleased with the result, it was fun adding all the little details actually and the quality of the plastic sculpt was just fantastic. The face in particular has loads of character for a plastic model.

So first up here's the mounted Raddy conversion:

And here's the chap on foot. I took fancier pics than normal for the mounted version as he was going into the painting challenge and forgot to snap the version on foot. So, I snapped a couple of pics of him today running across a cliff in front of a waterfall*. I was quite annoyed because I think the version on foot is better painted in every important area (face, beard, satchel, Sebastian) than the version on horse but I still entered the mounted version into the challenge as I figured the pose was slightly more interesting. Really enjoyed doing the base too, the spiders, mushrooms and everything were really good fun to pick out. Really lovely model all round.

*Is definitely a waterfall, is definitely not my parents' water feature...

So there we go, all in all I'm pleased with them and it was really great fun to paint something from the Hobbit range. Only thing is I'm now really up against it to get the rest of my army done in time for Battle Brothers next weekend. I'll be starting on my 2 eagles on Sunday and hope to have some pics up by Tuesday which should give me enough tome to get Eomer done by the end of the week, so yeah, should be a fair few updates over the next week or so. We'll see...

Thanks again for all the continued support!

Crucium Giger · **Posted:** Fri May 31, 2013 3:54 pm

Excellent job on both of them but I do love that conversion for him mounted

Tabletop_heroes · **Posted:** Fri May 31, 2013 8:43 pm

Love the conversion

and not a rabbit in sight...

ElfLover · **Posted:** Fri May 31, 2013 10:08 pm

Wonderful work on both those figures Dr Grant. If I was to pick between them on best painted I'd go with the one on foot but that conversion for him mounted is stunning :yay:

Oldman Willow · **Posted:** Sat Jun 01, 2013 2:37 am

Well done!

Sticky Fingersss · **Joined:** Sat Oct 09, 2010 11:20 am **Posts:** 1776

Wow, the conversion looks perfectly natural. Great job!

John Wayne · **Posted:** Sat Jun 01, 2013 12:44 pm

They are both well painted. Amazing mtd conversion :yay:

Ukfreddybear · **Posted:** Sat Jun 01, 2013 7:28 pm

I'm always pleased to see well executed conversions and this is certainly among them. Well done. :yay:

Harfoot · **Posted:** Sat Jun 01, 2013 9:57 pm

Lol Dr. My disappointment in no regular updates has more than been made up for in such quality pictures. Brilliant to put it simply. Looking forward to seeing the Eagles.

Dr Grant · **Joined:** Fri Aug 03, 2012 1:50 pm **Posts:** 1339

WOW! Thanks so much guys, your comments are all so lovely, glad you like the conversion, kinda justifies spending the best part of a month on it! I was a little apprehensive about putting everything on display to begin with but the encouragement from the community really helps with the motivation so big thumbs up to you all! :-D

I know I said I hoped to be back on Tuesday with an update but I ended up working on everything together so all the bits and bobs got finished together today. Be warned, this should hopefully be quite a pic-heavy post...

So, first up I have a couple of trees, I wanted to paint some trees to evoke the burnt ones at the end of the first Hobbit movie. I thought the Citadel Wood trees would be perfect for this as they are that rarest thing: Warhammer scenery that works for LOTR. They look nice and gnarled/burnt so I thought they'd be perfect. I used miliput to build up the base to fill the gap that is normally filled by the Citadel Wood base. I must credit Rognarr and ukfreddybear for their helpful input on how to paint burnt trees, following their advice I decided to paint the trees as normal first and then 'burn' them afterwards, so, a bit of dry brushing later I had these:

I then heavily dry brushed black and dark grey over the top to give a burnt effect, I was really pleased with the result and think the brown showing through gives a convincing finish, I also dry brushed the outer branches more lightly to hopefully give the impression that the fire had not reached them yet.

Anyhoo, why am I banging on about trees you ask? Well, they're to hold my eagles of course, I've never been a huge fan of the flying stands and prefer to have my flying models integrated into something else. The end of the Hobbit film provided the perfect inspiration for an in game diorama. Also, at January's Throne of Skulls, someone had mounted a couple of eagles in the citadel tress and I thought it looked really great, they'd used all the foliage so they looked like living trees but I thought I could take the same idea and hopefully create something akin to the end of the first film - and yes I know they're fir trees in the book/film :-)

Anyhoo, a few days of fun later and voila, I give you my new eagles!

Radagast's alliance for Battle Brothers this weekend:

And here's a size comparison with the eagles I painted a few weeks ago that really shows how much bigger these new minis are.

Gotta say I absolutely LOVED painting these figs, they're gorgeous models, clearly the best eagles GW have ever produced and they look great on the table. I'm also really glad I took the time to paint the old Warhammer Eagles as a test last month, they taught me a fair bit abut colour schemes and encouraged me to paint these ones a fair bit darker which I think looks far better and more natural. I'm really pleased with the way the tress turned out too, they become real centrepiece figures for the army. On the other hand putting them about a foot above the table means I'm unlikely to be getting any In The Way rolls for all the cretins shooting at them, oh well, we weren't gonna win anyway...

The last figure I had to paint for the Battle Brothers this weekend was my new Eomer. We're taking Eomer Knight of the Pellenor and as much as most people wouldn't care I wanted to make sure we had the right mini to represent him (he has an armoured horse I suppose). Besides, it's an awesome figure and it was good to have an excuse to paint it! So here he is, the last mini to join our glorious host this weekend, again I'm pretty pleased with him, he was good fun to paint, lots of interesting details to pick out.

So there we go, that's the latest, all done in good time (just) to take to Nottingham. I suppose it'd be rude at this stage to not give you all a pic of the whole army that's coming with us this weekend so here goes:

It's about the least competitive army we could come up with but it looks cool on the table and it's a lot of fun to use, just have to hope we don't come up against Nature's Wrath...

I can honestly say that it's been fun getting away from painting Uruks for a couple of months and getting stuck in to some of these gorgeous new Hobbit minis. After the weekend I'll be back to the 'day job' of trying to finish off my Isengard army, next up is a bunch of ferals and a few crossbowmen for a tourney at the end of June. After such a heavy few days of painting I'll probably take a week or so off but hopefully I'll have some WIP pics up sometime next weekend.

Now, just need to figure out how the hell I'm gonna get these eagles to Nottingham...

Sticky Fingersss · **Joined:** Sat Oct 09, 2010 11:20 am **Posts:** 1776

These eagles look fantastic. The trees idea is great.

Dr Grant's WIP [Forge World Ogres]

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