Reinforcements Have Arrived

My Army of the Dead needed some faster units so I've added a small detachment of cavalry to assist them - 6 Riders of the Dead now all painted up and ready for battle.

Note to self: repaint the base rims!

Morannon Orcs

 I painted up the 36 Morannon Orcs from the Pelennor Boxset with the aim of working on my accuracy and speed painting skills - originally I was aiming to spend about 5 minutes per model but I missed that target and spent about 12 minutes each for a total of  just over 7 hours. That's still considerably faster than anything else I've painted to date so I'm pretty pleased with my experiment. I could have saved about an hour by priming with Silver Spray but didn't have any.

I went with a fairly simple scheme and painted the entire army was one large batch, applying each colour to every model in turn. I've always painted in small batches before (maybe 6-8 models) so doing 36 in one go was rather different, but I actually really liked it as I could see the progress being made and everything got finished at the same time.

Broadly, the timings per model worked out at as follows:

• 2 mins to base silver, wash & drybrush
• 2 mins to base red & wash
• 2 mins to base grey, wash & highlight
• 2 mins to base faces, wash & highlight
• 1 min to paint, wash & highlight hair & fur
• 2 mins to paint & highlight straps (fiddly!)
• 1 min to paint & highlight wood areas

The Paint Scheme for future reference was as follows:

• Prime with Abaddon Black Spray

Armour

• Basecoat with Ironbreaker
• Wash with Reikland Fleshshade

Red Cloth

• Basecoat with Memphiston Red (2 coats needed)
• Wash with Druchi Violet

Grey Cloth

• Basecoat with Skavenblight Dinge
• Wash with Nuln Oil
• Highlight with Stormvermin Fur

Skin - Variant 1

• Basecoat with Baneblade Brown
• Wash with Agrax Earthshade
• Highlight with Baneblade Brown

Skin - Variant 2

• Basecoat with Doombull Brown
• Wash with Agrax Earthshade
• Highlight with Skrag Brown

Skin - Variant 3

• Basecoat with Catellan Green
• Wash with Agrax Earthshade
• Hightlight with Elysian Green

Hair

• Basecoat with Eshin Grey
• Wash with Nuln Oil
• Highlight with Dawnstone

Fur

• Basecoat with Mournfang Brown
• Wash with Agrax Earthshade

Wood

• Basecoat with Dryad Bark
• Highlight with Steel Legion Drab

Straps

• Basecoat with Dryad Bark
• Highlight with Gorthor Brown

Basing

• Apply coat of Stirland Mud
• Drybrush Tyrant Skull
• Add Tufts (Warpainter Scrub Grass small / standard tufts)
• Paint Base Rims Steel Legion Drab

2018 - October Update

This month I painted more models that I have in the last 2 years (not a great feat admittedly!). I'm amazed how much the re-launch of the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game has rekindled my interest in my hobby and it's been wonderful to have something to relax with in the evenings after work.

On the painting side I finished  the 20 Army of the Dead from the Pelennor Fields Boxset, plus the 10 I had lurking in storage, and the King of the Dead.

Even better, I spent a few evenings knocking together a display board for them and entered the Armies on Parade competition at GW Winchester. I quite rightly failed to place with my rather last-minute entry but I was so pleased to have produced something tangible (and at least one fine person decided to give me one of their votes so I even got a shiny pin for my cabinet!)

I also put together some scatter terrain so that I we can fight over something more interesting than piles of rocks

Total achievements:

Painted: 31 Models: 30 Army of the Dead + 1 King of the Dead

Bought: 14 Models:  6 Knights of Dol Amroth, 4 Morannon Orc Commanders, Betrayer Ft & Mounted and  Suladan Ft & Mounted (and a sneaky set of measures)

Scatter Terrain

I started this terrain before Armies on Parade but had to shelve it to make the display board so finished up a bit later than originally planned.

All credit for this goes to Mel the Terrain Tutor, whose excellent tutorials gave me the know-how to do this:

• I used the corrugated cardboard and polyfiller method of making bases from the Let's Make - Cheap & Easy Terrain Bases video

• And then used the decorating tips from Let's Make - Cheap & Easy Scenic CD Scatter Terrain Bases to add trees, bushes and flock scatter to them.

I'm very pleased with the results, and it's also held up well to being chucked in a cupboard for storage! In total there are 16 pieces of terrain, with the smallest about 2" in diameter and the largest about 12"x6"

Medium Ruin

Small Ruin

Medium Tree Stand

Medium Ruin

Stone wall

Small Ruin

Large Hillock

Rocky ground

Small tree stand

Small ruin

Small tree stand (spring green flock = not great!)

Small Ruin

Small terrain piece

Larger corner piece

Small ruin

Largest ruin

For future reference, the materials used are as follows:

• Bases: Corrugated cardboard packaging + Wickes Polyfiller
• Worked well, more time consuming than expected but would definitely use again
• Ruins: Games Workshop LOTR Ruins (discontinued)
• I'd accumulated a lot of these and am very pleased how they turned out. Ruins of Osgiliath would be the closest current equivalent
• Flock: Javis scenic scatter Rough Pasture (#JS19) & Spring Green (#71). The rough pasture was good, but the Spring Green is much too bright for my liking. I also used some Battlefields Grass Green (excellent) and some older lighter flock (which I would guess was from GW)
• Hedges: Javis Hedge Foliage Light Green (#JHF1) & Mid Green (#JHF2)
• Trees: Ebay 20x 7cm Green Trees, 20 x 9cm Green Trees & 10x 11cm / 9cm Bendable Trees. In terms of realism, only the 11cm trees are anywhere near the right scale, but if you ignore that fact they look pretty good for what I paid for them

Sort of believable with a foot model...

Definitely not believable with a mounted model!

Armies on Parade 2018

In one of my crazier plans I decided that having started painting my Army of the Dead on the 6th October it would be totally possible to get them ready for Armies on Parade on the 13th. It turns out it definitely was possible, but I had to cut a lot of corners putting the board together so whilst it made it to the event it's unlikely to ever be used again. Still, I was very pleased I put the effort in as it gave me a real boost to have something to take to the store as tangible proof that I was actually enjoying my hobby again.

The board was constructed on a 2x2 sheet of MDF that I had in storage (as you do) with a 1x1 removable back corner piece designed to be removed and stored in my display cabinet after the event. I knew that the board as a whole was unlikely to be kept so I thought it would be nice to keep a piece as a display for my Army and I'm pleased to say this worked very well. The board was roughed out with cheap polystyrene hacked into shape with a craft knife and then covered in polyfiller. Because I only had 2 evenings to build this beast I gave it a couple of hours to start drying and then used PVA to fix down some rocks / bigger scatter and then covered the whole thing in a good layer of brown & black poster paints mixed with pva and kiln dried sand to give it some texture then left it overnight to dry.

The next day it was mostly dry so I painted the rocks grey before I went to work and then gave the whole thing a good drybrushing with a light brown paint for the soil / light grey for the rocks when I got home. After dinner I applied liberal amounts of static grass (Army Painter Steppe Grass) and chiselled out some space at the front to add a nice quote from the Lord of the Rings books to give it some context.

I forgot to take a picture of the final piece (and damaged it a bit getting it home) so this is the best picture I have of the finished product


When I got home I carefully removed the back-left segment and installed this in my display cabinet where it will now reside permanently.

Painting the Army of the Dead

These guys were a pleasure to paint as they require absolutely no detail work at all!

Painting Recipe is as follows for future reference:

• Prime with Skull White (Corax White) Spray
• Basecoat with Corax White (just filling in anywhere the spray missed)
• Wash with Hexwraith Flame and apply patches of Coelia Greenshade to break it up
• Drybrush with Ulthuran Grey

Basing

• Stirland Mud
• Drybrush with Tyrant Skull
• Add Grass Tufts (Serious Play 6mm Mini Tufts / 4mm Tufts in 'Winter')

2018 - September Update

After years of hobby stagnation I'm finally digging out my paints again and getting back into Middle Earth in a big way. I decided to take the plunge and pick up the new Pelennor Fields box-set.

Holidays prevented me from doing much painting this month, but I have built all of the Army of the Dead and the Morannon Orcs and we even managed to squeeze in our first ever game across the dining table (wherein my Riders of Rohan were soundly prevented from carrying warning to Minas Tirith by some surprisingly resilient Morannon Orcs).

I did half-paint 12 warriors of Minas Tirith + Cirion, but I didn't' finish them so I don't think they count!

I also took inventory of my model stash and determined that I have approximately 1,300 models / 30,000 points worth of Armies in my collection. I'm giving myself a pass this month, but in the future my aim is to paint more models than I buy - gotta start chipping away at that backlog!

Summary:
Bought: 84 models
Painted: None.