From NoelW: Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant: (330 points)

We’d thought when we reached the Snowlord’s mountain retreat, the worst would be over. There’d be treasure lying about on the slopes for us to gather by the armful. No such luck. Apparently, though, you have to get to the very top. How unreasonable is that!

And rather than scattered with gold and jewels, the slopes are, in fact, covered in tourists. And they're all doing more or less what we’re doing – which is annoying in the extreme.

I suppose they’ve come to see the famous statues that mark the ascent. Supposedly these are carved into the hillside as homage to famous adventurers, but I don’t recognises any of them.

And some are obviously not that famous. They’re clearly aeons older, not recent commemorations at all, they’re more like chthonic relics – a bit like some of the island inhabitants we’ve encountered on our way here.

The tourists themselves are a mixed bunch. Some are quite colourful, though apparently also colourblind.

Others, quite the opposite, would benefit from a little colour. Bland dress blends them into the hillside, so we keep on stumbling over mounds of them unexpectedly, the silly hillocks.

Then there's one guy must’ve lost his camera or his credit card or something, the way he was searching under every bush and tussock and wailing like a cat that's been sat on when he doesn't find it. He has a terrible cold, too, poor chap, sniffing away all the time and judging by his voice, a pretty bad sore throat, too.

Not wanting to catch his sniffles, we push on for the peak as quickly as we can, hoping we'll get there soon.

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This is another Lord of the Rings submission. Once I’d opened up the boxes of unpainted LOTR figures, I decided I wanted to get as many painted as quickly as possible – they’d been waiting so long, it was time to get them ready for the table. So whilst this is not exactly speed painting, it’s not high quality work, either – it’s essentially batch painting using mainly GW Contrast colours, with selective shading and highlighting, but not much detail, looking for effectiveness in the mass (like the Easterlings in the previous post).

I find the Contrast paints a bit of a mixed blessing. They produce some wonderful effects, and can save a lot of time, but if you don’t spot inappropriate pooling, or fail to control the flow so it stays within the areas you want, you can find yourself reworking areas again and again. I’ve done more “correcting” on these figures than on any painted in more conventional ways.

The post contains:

24 Rangers - a plastic box set - painted using eight of the Contrast paint browns and greens, but then cleaned up a bit with Foundry, Army Painter and Vallejo paints;

38 Haradrim, using Contrast Blood Angels Red, Flesh Tearers Red, Talassar Blue (a really lovely colour, but one with no real historical application, I think), Shyish Purple and some Black Templar, though most of the black areas are actually Army Painter Black, as Black Templar is generally too greyish for anything that’s not cloth.

1 mounted Ringwraith, basically black undercoated and drybrushed, with the horse painted conventionally. (I plan to have all nine Ringwraiths. They’re among my favourite models in the LOTR range.)

8 statues. These are obviously intended as scenery, multi-use, primarily LOTR and Frostgrave – hence the number of white statues. They were pieces in a chess set. I trimmed off the signs of their origins, undercoated them in appropriate primary colours, and then drybrushed up to the final effect.

Scoring:

62 x 28mm foot = 310 points

1 x 28mm mounted = 10 points

8 x statues = ?? In other posts, humanoid statues have been treated as figures of the appropriate size/scale. The smallest here is 50mm (ignoring its base) and the largest 80mm, which seems to suggest something like 80 points or more. But as the painting is essentially just drybrushing, that’s perhaps a little excessive.

By Paul:
BOOM! Noel's little LOTR points bomb explodes like an Uruk-hai black powder breaching charge at Helm's deep.

Thats quite the collection of tourists on the road to the Snowlord's peak - you've clearly gone in peak season.  Its going to be quite the party at basecamp while you wait to ascend!

Mass does indeed have a quality all of its own and you've shown here Noel. I'm with you on the contrast paint too - they can be good but they are no silver bullet.

For the statues, noting they are a single colour drybrush without basing I'm going to score them as terrain vice figures.  Collectively hey look like about half a standard terrain cube so 10 points for them, and overall thats an impressive 330 points - well done!