The One Ring September Painting Challenge: Warbands (Completed)

Finally I have all of my orcs done for the Warbands challenge. Between working on these guys, painting my friend’s birthday gift, creating a few Lord of the Rings conversions (will paint them up soon) and working on a Star Wars commission project I have been a hobby-madman this month!

One thing I hate to do is batch painting, so what I did was to make each orc a unique looking fellow (barring the two plastic orcs). Tried to give each one a wee bit of different coloring to his skin, different color schemes for their cloth and even added a bit of humor to three of the orcs…I call these guys ‘the rooster’ and his two ‘hens’.

Angmar/Mordor Orc Warband

My Buddies 42nd Birthday Gift

I picked up the PuppetsWar Grim Reaper model for my best friend’s 42nd birthday…nothing says you’re getting old like getting a Grim Reaper for your birthday! I’m such a horrible dick! LOL

Grim Reaper

100,000+ Page Views

Thanks to everyone who has visited my blog, I never imagined that I would hit a mark like this! You guys humble me with your comments and I hope that I continue to provide you with interesting hobby content!

Newest Angmar Spectre (WIP)

While I work on a commission project and my monthly challenge for One Ring I have been breaking up the time by adding to my spectre ranks by digging through my parts drawer and finding leftovers to slam together…here is going to be a female spectre wielding a broken sword. I still need to tatter up her clothing, but thought I’d post her as is for a WIP update.

Giant Spiders By eBob

First off let me tell you straight up, I hate spiders…they scare the shit out of me! Now with that in mind, when I saw the Games Workshop Giant Spiders they never gave me an iota of dread…not even a momentary shiver; then I saw the Giant Spiders from eBob Miniatures, and these things creeped me the hell out. After having these pieces in my collection for well over two years now I have finally gotten the balls to paint these things up.

 

In the photos shown above you can see that the legs and the bottom of the carapace are the same for each spider, however there are three different body types that I displayed alongside to show you the variants in selection. Assembly is demanding of your patience and steadiness of your hands…these took me about two hours just to assemble the spiders due to my MS…I’m sure you guys probably won’t have the issues I had. Here is a link to the assembly instructions.

Once I was sure the glue was completely dry I re-positioned them in three different poses to suit the bases they were placed on. I put them onto normal Games Workshop 40mm round cavalry bases, however they do come with a low profile 40mm base that doesn’t quite match up height wise with the GW bases and that little difference in height wasn’t something that I could live with…hehe.  For the color scheme I painted them in varying shades of blacks, browns (added a little green to one) and greys. The eyes were done with a high gloss black ink.

Giant Spiders

The One Ring September Painting Challenge: Warbands

For this month’s challenge we are doing ‘Warbands‘, and needing some orcs for my Angmar and Mordor armies I decided to go in that direction. I have had several of the 14 original metal orc warriors in my collection for some time now and figured this would be a good time to get some of them painted. For this challenge we need to have 1 Hero and 8-12 Infantry Units…I have decided to start at the minimum of 8 orc warriors and if time allows I will add to that number. I also created my own hero model from the remnants of a Gothmog, a Hasslefree goblin head, a plastic orc and lots of green stuff.

Now, onto finishing my last spider before working on these guys.

Three Giant Spider Bases

I have been working on three eBob Giant Spiders and needed to make sure my bases were completed before I even thought about gluing the spider down. I also wanted to make each of the bases unique like the three different sculpts the spiders come in…so one has a large rock, another with a fallen tree and the last with a dead body (also sculpted by eBob…no better base to use it on than an eBob spider’s base).

The coloring was done similar to my other evil based models…dark brown earth with bleached/dead grass. Even the dead body I wanted to be done in a muted color palette as to not detract from the sculpt of the spider.

40mm Giant Spider Bases

Angmar Duskwraith

I picked up the Vampire Counts Cairn Wraith to use as another evil unit in my Angmar army…a Duskwraith. I was going to swap out the scythe for a mace to better fit the rules for the character that were published a while back in White Dwarf; which at this point in time, are nothing more than glorified house rules as Games Workshop has rewritten the Angmar armies in their new book, The Lord of the Rings: Moria & Angmar. Instead I opted to stick with the scythe as it would have looked a bit wonky trying to have him hold a mace with both hands.

As it shows in the photo of the rules above, the model is mounted on a 25mm round base, so I went with that size base to keep things as close to legit as possible. As for the color scheme I decided to go with a very pale blue wet blending up to a nearly pure white on the edges. His eyes were painted black to give them an empty and foreboding feeling. I initially wanted to give them a glow effect, but figured that with the ethereal look to the paint job they would get lost in the grand scheme of things.

 Duskwraith 

Citadel Finecast Commentary

Well, I finally purchased my first Citadel Finecast product from Games Workshop…a Vampire Counts Cairn Wraith. It took me a long while to get up the nerve to spend money on their product due to reading so many horror stories about miscasting, bubbles, warped halves not fitting together properly, etc, etc. Not to mention all the catchy little monikers the Finecast product has been dubbed, Failcast, Finecrap, etc. However, I am happy to say that my first Finecast model has been defect free…do I expect my future purchases to come as nice as this one? I would hope so for the price tag that the Finecast product have been blessed with, however I still have doubts due to all the unhappy reporting on the message boards and blogosphere.

Honestly I prefer metal miniatures over plastic or resin (I like the weight and sturdiness to them), but with the detail that I have seen so far I can say this product could really grow on me. Games Workshop, please continue to hone your skills with this product and you will continue to get my business.

Now, onto painting this little fellow! 😀

White Warg Chieftain

I took the warg from the new mounted Gothmog miniature, removed the reins and collar from the model and sculpted new bits of fur over the top of where they were. I have the original chieftain model and with this unique pose it will add another level of diversity to the warg contingent of my Angmar army.

The color scheme was simple, just a series of greys, khakis and a little white to break up the muted palette. Basing him was a different challenge…I didn’t want the warg to be stepping on the dead bodies that the original model came with, so I had to find a suitable rock from my garden to rest his raised back leg on. I hid the joint where his foot met the rock with some snow flock and that completed the look.

White Warg Chieftain