From TeemuL: "I am no man" [Literature] (95 points)

• Witch King: [taking Eowyn by the throat] You fool. No man can kill me. Die now.
• [Merry stabs the Witch King from behind; the Witch King shrieks and falls to his knees. Eowyn rises and pulls off her helm, her hair falls down over her shoulder]
• Eowyn: I am no man.
• [she thrusts her sword into the Witch King's helm and twists; he shrieks and implodes]*

*From imdb.com

This topic was difficult for me, maybe I was overthinking it, may be not. May be it was my lack of English skills to understand "snooty" and "highbrow". I mean Literature might be easy, just have a book reference for example, but the whole Challenge is about the books and the description of the topic made it more difficult. Happily my Thor's Day crew was helpful and enlightened me that snooty can for example mean Jacob Rees Mogg (UK politician) or a high elf, highbrow might mean Einstein or a Doctor at the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences of Newcastle University. In the end I decided to try a literal approach. And use couple of more words than are actually needed.

The Witchking of Angmar is snooty to me, if I understood correctly. Likes to look down on others and is completely arrogant and believes to be immortal. There is an old "prophecy" regarding him, made by Glorfindel during the Second Age: "Do not pursue him! He will not return to these lands. Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man shall he fall." The prophecy is quite literal, because in the end it needed a male hobbit and a female human to kill him. May be he should have been more literal and consider the holes in his theory? I guess snooty and highbrow people tend not to do that.

This trio is from Games Workshop boxed set "The Fall of the Witchking", those mini diorama style boxes they used to make in order to sell the same characters with different sculpts over and over again. And in the movie Merry is without his helmet, so this is not even accurate. I got this years ago as second hand, box was opened, but nothing done except removing the stab from Eowyn, that's why she is on an mdf base.

Some time ago I painted all my Rohans and in the last Challenge painted the rest of the Rohans - those with broken or missing weapons converted to standard bearers and musicians. This time I finish the same army third time by adding Merry and Eowyn in Rohan uniforms. They were fast to paint, since the colours were well known to me and even the black Witchking was quite easy to paint with two drybrushes of different shades of grey. I have painted a dozen or so ringwraiths in the past, so a well know method. I even managed to paint Eowyn's eyes quite well.

This is quite a surprise entry. These are from Warlord Games's Gaul Tribesmen, a box from my "paint the models and get more storage room by recycling the cardboard box" challenge. Why a surprise? These were on my list to finish during the Challenge, but I didn't know I would paint them so quick. In theory they were painted in a single session with Citadel Contrasts, but in practice they took couple of quite short sessions. They don't have many details and while I skipped the squares, stripes and other markings, they were super easy and fast to paint. Perfect for painting gamer, who wants ok quality in no time. Very far from modern GW minis for example.

I chose quite bright colours as suggested by the box art and then quite randomly painted blues pants there, a blue shirt there. There are couple of grey and off-white here and there to create contrasts. I don't know the colour of hair of Gauls, so I went quite random there, too.

I used the bases from the box. They are quite thin and the edge is higher than the rest of the base, so a miniature with a small attached "base" sinks a bit inside the base and basing hides a bit of the attached base. Quite clever. I should have added some basing stuff there before starting to paint, but these are ok.

The models themselves were single piece plastics with metal spears. I have not encountered this method before, but I'm quite firmly in the fantasy section of the hobby. There are some mould lines, which could have been removed, but I didn't bother. So they were quite easy to assemble, too, just add the spear (or javelin). And the spears won't snap like plastic spears. I'm very happy with these, the only problem being that I really don't have any game use for them... At least yet.

The boxes emptied and minis painted - more storage room!

After revisiting the Section 1, I go back to completed Section 2 and enter the Section 4. Some kitbashing next...

I hope the literal requirements of the Literature topic is fulfilled with this entry and I can claim 15 points for 3 28mm minis and 20 bonus points for the Literature topic. And then 60 points for 12 28mm minis without any topic relation.

 

 

Sylvain: Your Literature entry is well argued. And well painted too. It was a great scene of the final movie of the trilogy, and a great dad joke at the Ring-Wraith's expense. Like you I find that spears are tricky to work with, but your combination of plastic and metal seems to work well. Excellent job!