From TeemuL: Middle-Earth extras [Limo] (55 points)

"As we all know, adventure movies don't really have a plot, or a beginning or an end, no theme, just lots of action and adventure to keep the audience busy and emotional. 'Wild Wandering Adventures of Murin and Drar during the time of Lord of the Rings' is exactly that, but of course there needs to be some kind of  a script and we have several! At least drafts. There will be flashbacks, so here we have an old dwarf king, there's Mardin with his huge spear and some more warriors for action scenes. There is also an Barrow-wight Lord, we know (and dwarfs know), that there are several treasures buried in Barrow-Downs and dwarfs love treasures. They have no problem with going underground, but they might be a bit scared of ghosts, but Murin and Drar will gather their courage and visit those treasure chambers. And yes, Easterling Shamaness for a sub-plot scene, let's see if she stays in the final production or not."

Five more dwarfs, but these are metal ones from Games Workshop, not plastic. I guess the regular warriors are from the initial release, when they had a very limited plastic support. As is noted in this same Challenge, for some reason they are wearing chainmails (2 out of 3 anyway), but none of the plastics are. Well, they were nice to paint anyway.

Then there is one Dwarf King, one of those to receive a ring from Sauron, I guess. There are four different sculpts and I painted three of them two Challenges ago, but now I have the full set painted. Kings don't wear the the green and blue like the regular warriors, they use much more colours. Actually there is no green on this king.

And then we have Mardin, bodyguard of Durin I, with a huge spear. Black eye patch marks him as a veteran. He wears green and blue. All dwarfs are Contrast jobs excluding the metallics. The chainmails are Black Templar Contrast and then light drybrush of Leadbelcher.

I guess that counts as a real skull, not just a bony face?

Barrow-wight Lord (Mithril M256) follows the paint scheme of GW Barrow-wights which I painted in 2016. Here he is flanked by two of those previously painted minis. He has less armour, so is not necessarily that interesting. The recipe for painting is similar to Dead of Dunharrow, paint in grey and blue wash. But these have green highlight. When I originally painted the GW wights, I thought that they looked better without the green, so painted the Dunharrow ghosts without the green. Now I'm not that sure. I like how these look. And these have real weapons, not ghost weapons, so much more colourful than ghosts. He is on 32mm mdf base and of course there are no specific rules for him in MESBG, but I can use him as a regular wight - as long as my opponent approves the bigger base. :)

Last but not least, Easterling Shamaness (Mithril M322), who doesn't look like anything like the Easterlings in the movies. Actually I made a small mistake, I thought she was a different model and painted in dirty and dark colours, but I guess that works for a shamaness. They don't usually wear bright uniforms. And no rules for her, of course. May be she could be used as a war priest...

I do hope that this Shamaness grants me a ride to World Cinema.

In total 7 28mm minis for 35 points and 1 Limo for 20 points, 55 in total. And then my first skull for Skull Duel.

______________________

Haha! I'm loving reading the production woes of 'Murin & Drar'. I really hope it all comes together and it makes it to the big screen, or at least to a streaming service.  :) While the GW dwarves are great (that spear is immense), my favourites are still these wonderful models from Mithril miniatures. The Barrow-wight Lord is excellent, and with your paint scheme, fits in nicely with the GW offerings. The Easterling Shamaness is very characterful as well, though I'm somewhat puzzled with her blue oven mitt right hand. She reminds me of Julia Child tentatively reaching out to a hot soufflé.  :P

Grand work, Teemu! Bring us more of these, please.

- Curt

From NoelW for Thursday: An orcward post (270 points)

My second post this week is a return to Lord of the Rings, one of my favourite gaming arenas. To support the warg riders I posted before, today's offering is mainly a mass of ugly orcs. I'm hoping they'll be followed by another batch before the Challenge ends.

But first, four barrow wights. These are nice castings, though I'm not sure why I've two sets of them. I really like the blue and silver combination though, as usual, my poor photography makes them look rather lighter than in reality:

My notion of the LOTR orcs is dressed in all sorts of rags and scavenged garments, so they would be multicoloured but overall essentially be dark and filthy, with armour that was battered and rusty. There’d be a strong degree of uniformity across the army, despite all that underlying variety, and Tolkien's descriptions (which, as is usual with him, are not very precise) emphasise the darkness and filth of orcishness, so that's what I'm going for.

For priming I experimented with the zenithal method as advocated by Tamsin (thanks, Tamsin), but I didn’t get it right. Possibly I had the spray too close to the figures to get the best results or I chose bad angles. It did produce some interesting shading on a few figures, and so I've used washes in a few places to take advantage of that. But mainly the effects were unreasonable, so I had to ignore the shading that resulted and overpaint uniformly. I will, however, persist with the experiment.

Instead, I relied on Army Painter Dark Shade to do most of the shading for me and provide that army uniformity over the many different colours I used on each figure. I picked out some colours with selective highlighting but limited it to a few instances per figure. I definitely didn't want any colour to "pop" and attract the eye. My orcs are a morose, miserable, muddy mass. Armour was painted silver them washed with flesh wash for a rusty effect.

The end result is not the most beautiful army in the world but even so quite convincingly a mass of evil ragamuffins. Here are two of their captains:

And a smattering of archers:

And finally the marauding mass itself:

That’s 50 orcs and 4 barrow wights = 270 points  

What a great mass of orcs! Suitably gritty,dirty and rusty! They work really well! The wrights are great! The ethereal blue and highlighted black works really well together! 270 points it is,a slightly dirty boom!

All the best Iain