Lord of the Rings – various adventures in Middle Earth

[Zemlod]

After a long pause I finally decided to get my increasingly sizeable behind up and post what little progress I've mande over the last two years. Apart from some 40K stuff (mainly for my Praetorians) I've also started on two LotR armies which I'll now be chronicling here.

I'll start off with some Goblins of Moria. These were painted as a last-minute idea before visiting a friend, so I tried to paint them as fast as at all possible. Lesson learned: Colour Primer and Devlan Mud are an amazing combination! I painted all of the below during just "The Longest Day" "Patton" and "Gettysburg" (plus some Fr. Ted..). So, the painting standard is not what it could have been, but I managed to put everything on the table in time...

First of all the command:
a Goblin-King and a Shaman.




A drum to keep the old morale up:



And a sarge to keep the little critters in line:



Also, some heavies and a bit of distrations so I'll actually be able to win any fights at all..:


One of the trolls came from a "Mines of Moria" set I've picked up from ebay that was almost beyond all use. Some crazy had basecoated all terrain in heavy duty metallic (car?) primer and the models appear to have been glued together by a drunk or a four-year-old. Possibly both.
So, don't mind the gap.

And not to forget the horde:





I'll try to get some decent shots of the Khazad-dûm lads tomorrow.

Cheers,
Zemlod

[system-syn]

Looking good, I especially like the bats, hot did you paint the wings if you don't mind me asking? I might just pinch it

[Zemlod]

Thanks!

Because I was in quite a hurry, i chose a really simple scheme for the critters:

I basecoated everything with Chaos Black spray, then gave it a dusting with Army Painter's Leather Brown.
The wings were then painted in Charadon Granite, followed by a heavy wash of Badab Black (repeat if necessary),
then a drybrush of Charadon Granite again, followed by a light drybrush of Codex Grey and an even lighter of Fortress Grey.

Something else I built to play agains the Rohirrim of a friend was a little casualty marker:




One of his casualties of course
In the end I lost only 2 Dwarves while wiping out his entire force of ~400 pts. of Rohirrim


While there are no rules for him (yet?), I also did this nice Mithril Miniatures version of Beorn:




edit:
oh, and some more Goblins...

[Zemlod]

I also did some LotR-terrain as well:









Can you guess which army will'll be next?

[Zemlod]

Well, I still haven't gotten around to take pics of the dwarves.

Not too exiting, just a bit of terrain, but at least there has been some progress painting wise...

[Karak Norn Clansman]

Nice progress this far, tasteful colour scheme and wonderful pick of forces: Gobbos and dwarves. You can't do better.

[RunepriestRidcully]

Looks awesome!

[Cuchulain84]

Very nice work and it's great to see some new LOTR/Hobbit threads popping up

[Zemlod]

I know I said I'd do some dwarves next, but I got distracted. So here's some Hobbits!

I really like these minis, so I even did some characters twice, probably more coming...

There's only a handful of 'warriors', so i did some twice as well and gave them some weapon swaps and a different colour scheme. The replacement weapons are from the Wargames Factory Vikings.



















Next up on the Hobbit workbench will be a couple of archers and another Frodo.

[Karak Norn Clansman]

Really good Hobbitses.

Do you have the whole collection of Shire Hobbits? Nice weapon swaps!

[Zemlod]

Really good Hobbitses.

Do you have the whole collection of Shire Hobbits? Nice weapon swaps!

Thanks!

I don't think I have all of them yet. I think there were some shirrifs with sticks and at least one mounted hobbit. Not counting the mounted versions of the four 'main hobbits', that is... But my goal actually is to paint all of them. Sometime...

In the meantime, here's some Moria Goblins I found primed on my painting station. They were hiding, but here they are. It was really fun to paint some proper metal miniatues again after all those Reaper Bones. These sculpts are just so full of details. That I can't really do justice to, but anyway.

I did these with some spots of red to show that they're captains so i can distinguish them more easily from the regular goblins. They have yet to score a victory against the Dwarves, so I thought it's probably a good idea to add some slightly better fighters. If that doesn't help, I might just have to get another cave troll...

[StygianBeach]

Very nice work there.

I just recently got back into LotRs myself, and the Hobbits are brilliant models.

Your Goblins look great, I love the way their eyes are painted, make them look really crazy.

[Karak Norn Clansman]

Nice, keep it up! Seeing Lotr models treated this well makes me happy.

[lonelybrick]

Good to see middle earth alive and flourishing. Love to see those dwarfs.

[Zemlod]

Thanks for your kind feedback!

I really like the less cartoony, more "realisitc" stlye of the Lord of the RIngs models. It's a pity that they no longer really support the game. I wonder how long until they discontinue it alltogether...

Good to see middle earth alive and flourishing. Love to see those dwarfs.

Oh dear, I almost forgot! Well, I just took them out to photography them - only to realise that I had skipped the final highlighs on the skin on almost all of them. grrrr.. Now that that's sorted, they look almost presentable... I still will have to do some more highlights on the armor and the ranger's cloaks, but for the time being, I'll leave it at that. You'll see that these were painted some years ago and I'm happy to say, I feel my painting has indeed improved a little since when I originally did these. Anyway:

First, here's a box of rangers. As you can see, I switched the basing style about halfway through. I'm undecided at the moment. I like the subterranean look of the gray cave bases, but the brown and white bases have better contrast. Does anyone of you have any preferences?

[Zemlod]

Next, a couple of warriors. Not the whole box, I've noticed. Strange. I converted one warrior to serve in the ballista crew, you'll see him below, but a couple of his mates seem to have gotten lost. I'll probably find them somewhere in the lower strata of Mount Lead...

One of the warriors was done in red, I'm using him as a captain.

[Zemlod]

And here's the rest of my dwarves that I've painted so far.

I converted a regular dwarf so he can join the ballista crew. Plus some leaders and assorted royalty.

I had no end of trouble putting that fe*ing ballista together. I don't want to join in on the finecast bashing, but I was only inches away from tossing it into the bin or flattening it with something well heavy. I can bear having to heat and re-heat the spears of fiddly bits on reaper bones, because they're cheap and nobody tried to convince me that they are the ultimate next step in casting quality. To be fair, I also had some finecast models that were really ok (none without any gaps or bubbles yet though..) but this is not one of them.







This is Gimli from the Mines of Moria set. I think I have one or two other scuplts of him somewhere in the pile.

[Karak Norn Clansman]

Dwarves! Magnificient Dwarves. Sorry to hear about toe ballista trouble.

[HappyMephistopheles]

Wow! I'm quite impressed that you painted that much gobos in that short an amount of time. They look great, even more so with the low amount of iron they got and the tin look of the little plate armours. It's not right to mourn the lack of conversions, I know, especially since most LotR models do not really support it that easily, but you didn't change anything with the Goblins except for a shield or two, right?
It's a shame really, that they lack heavy hitters except for trolls. They look great though. I like the gritty, brownish colour scheme.

First, here's a box of rangers. As you can see, I switched the basing style about halfway through. I'm undecided at the moment. I like the subterranean look of the gray cave bases, but the brown and white bases have contrast better. Does anyone of you have any preferences?

I'd vote for the gray cave bases. Fits well with the gobos and the whole living in a hole-thing. Plus it would really shine if you'd some day decide to make some Moria props and such.
Any chance we'll see the other members of the fellowship besides Gimli? Got the Moriabox here myself and am not quite convinced how to paint them and stuff. :/

[Zemlod]

Wow! I'm quite impressed that you painted that much gobos in that short an amount of time. They look great, even more so with the low amount of iron they got and the tin look of the little plate armours. It's not right to mourn the lack of conversions, I know, especially since most LotR models do not really support it that easily, but you didn't change anything with the Goblins except for a shield or two, right?
It's a shame really, that they lack heavy hitters except for trolls. They look great though. I like the gritty, brownish colour scheme.

I'd vote for the gray cave bases. Fits well with the gobos and the whole living in a hole-thing. Plus it would really shine if you'd some day decide to make some Moria props and such.
Any chance we'll see the other members of the fellowship besides Gimli? Got the Moriabox here myself and am not quite convinced how to paint them and stuff. :/

Thanks!

I painted the first batch as fast as I could because I wanted to have a playable army ready to take with me on a trip to a friend. I took quite a lot of shortcuts with them; really refreshing after doing severas squads of Praetorian Guardsmen in their meticulous uniforms as well as I could... Colour primer and devlan mud are really an awesome combination!

In fact I did do a couple of conversions but simply failed to take any pictures of them

I can only find two of them at the moment - I could have sworn I swapped a third spear... He must be hiding somewhere atm. Or I only imagined having finished him and he's actually still in the unpainted box. That has happened to me before.

Anyway, to break up the monotony of the spears I gave spears to two sword&shield goblins. I then attempted to find something to use as a replacement for their hands. I think one has a Wargames Factory Viking Hand and the other one has an armored glove made of someone other's knee...


I have the rest of the Moria heroes as well. I definitely plan on doing them sometime. Along with the scenery. If only i could find the old painting articles from the GW website from way back then. I wonder if anybody did archive the Black Gobbo pages...