A kind of fellowship

 

One of the good things that happened in 2020 was getting a bit of time and motivation to sculpt along with Rob Inglis reading Lord of the Rings. I know I am not alone in having Tolkien to thank for the considerable proportion of my life currently spent in worlds of fantasy! I also suspect I am not alone in having my image of Middle Earth cemented by listening to the BBC radio play and looking at the art of Alan Lee. The pictures that play in my head as I read or listen aren't well represented by the films (about which the less said the better) and as a result there aren't that many miniatures that capture them either, so I thought I would have a go myself. Last week I got to spend some time painting them whilst listening to the radio play which was a very pleasant experience.

Gandalf is the archetypal wizard right? The way I see Gandalf isn't actually based on an illustration of Mithrandir himself but on an Alan painting of Odin, and I have taken this quite closely as my inspiration. Because it's not an official Gandalf figure I have had to make some changes, he has a raven familiar and a hand on top of his staff (nods to the Odin/Wothan myth) and represents Weithand the Wise from the Mythic Heroes Woods supplement.

Hobbits/halflings tend to be represented in miniature as fat, with short legs and big heads. There are some good reasons for this. One is that it's hard to make slender models that are very small and also detailed, another is that they have been interpreted as comical characters in many derivative versions of Tolkien's world. My own picture of Hobbits is based very firmly on Alan Lee's illustrations from The Hobbit- paunched but not 'fat' and with quite slender, proportionally long legs. I have tried to do similar. The result is that they are a bit taller than many manufacturers' halflings whilst still shorter than a regular 28mm human. Not entirely to scale as I envisage them but the best I could get them and still have them cast ok.

Legolas is a wood elf, a type which has now become fixed in high fantasy terms but which has largely centred around the elves of Lorien rather than Mirkwood. My elf bowman is also based on an Alan Lee drawing, this time one of the Tuatha de Danaan which features in the Faeries book. He's rather more wild-looking, not so clean and refined as a 'regular' silvan elf. After all in The Hobbit the elves of Thranduil's court get up to some trickery not befitting of the elegant elves of the Golden Wood.

For dwarfs/dwarves the image in my head is wonderfully captured by Paul Bonner's illustrations. Kind of Scandinavian with their cloaks, moccasin-like boots and beards. He's smoking a pipe, of course.

In my head Boromir is dark-haired with a beard. Not a bushy one like in Bakshi's film (so much right with that movie, so much wrong with his viking Boromir!) but a groomed black affair. The armour of my bold warrior is based on the illustrations of Charles Keeping in an illustrated version of Beowulf my English teacher in primary school gave me. I still have it and it still has pride of place on the bookshelf! He's armed with a spear, a much more practical weapon and trvael-aid. 

So there we are. My kind-of fellowship for my dark age fantasy world. If anyone is interested in picking up a copy The Grey Company will be on Kickstarter at the beginning of February: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oakbound/the-grey-company

A kind of fellowship

We are the fighting Uru Lukinnat!

Happy new year settlers of blogsphere! This Christmas was a bit of a first, with no need to travel and the big day falling in the middle of the first week I had 9 clear days which translated (with a cold and impromptu days out and housework) into a solid 5 days of paintingand sculpting. :)

Thus was I able to expand my Orctober efforts to a mighty 2000pts of not-green skins. The mighty, fighting Uru Lukinatt, greatest goblinoid horde of Morrrrrrdooorrrrrrr! To be fair, not all of these were started and finished in the holidays, the crossbow arrer boyz has been creeping towards being finished for most of November and December. 40 odd goblins and 15 orcs, however, are a pretty good turnover for 5 days, even if they are definitely tabletop standard!

Speaking of standard...

I'm not totally sure, but someone fluent in black speech told me the approximate translation is "Oo are yoo lookin' at? Boris is my aunty", whatever that might mean. I figured it was a good moment to revive a truly oldhammer tradition, putting detested leaders on banners! The stone tablet afixed to the pole carries the regiment's official motto "Break shit, done". The reverse of the banner, designed to spur on the following unit, carries the unofficial motto.

I realised I needed to double my number of goblin warriors to make it effective, but was having difficulty finding an economically viable way of doing this. Luckily I had dug out some Moria goblins to paint and had been playing with Prince August home casting moulds that Harry gave me. The worst thing about both these sets of models was the heads, so I experimented replacing them with the very Angus McBride-style orc heads once released by Wargames Factory. They're oversized, as fits a goblin, and really helps lend them a LotR vibe. A short amount of superglue on fingers and broken knife blades later and...

Not too shabby. I had the bow goblins left, so thought I'd get myself a small unit of wolfriders to harass enemy flanks. Because they have a bit of a steppe goblin look I thought I'd put them on the Tibetan mastiffs I sculpted a few years back, with two huge RAFM wolves as mummy and daddy. Really pleased with how how the poses worked out.

This was also a great opportunity to paint up a recent acquisition. I've had my eye on an old Asgard Half Troll Chieftain for some years and last year finally got it together to collect a small group of buyers together and order from Viking Forge who still make them. He's too small to be a proper troll, of course, but makes an excellent Orcish Warboss.

The rest of the orcs are a mish mash of still-available miniatures and a few oldies I had available. I had ordered from SHQ at the start of December, but sadly still no sign of those despite being assured they were on their way. As it turns out I think I have enough orcs, I was just hoping a few of their mountain orcs might go with Alternative Armies one to make a small unit of Black Orcs and allow me to field my warboss as one. I still have some boarboyz to add, and am looking for the savage orc boarboy boss if anyone has one for trade or sale in the UK. He was my first metal Citadel Miniature, painted in Humbrol enamels and car body paints, and I would love to have another crack at him.

The background, in case you are wondering, was the product of the wife and I having our first lesson with Bob Ross to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Still lots to work on (it really isn't as easy as it looks!) before I try to tackle anything specific, but works nicely for a soft-focus backdrop.

The photo at the top shows the whole horde, this shows just the figures completed since Christmas (including 14 arrer boyz started in November).

We are the fighting Uru Lukinnat!

Orctober Fest 2019

I painted some orcs.

I realised that I only had two sets of orcs- my Goblinoids set which live in their nice display cabinet and my Heroquest orcs. What I needed was some gaming orcs!

Sadly prices of classic Citadel orcs seem to have gone up even more than when i was doing the Combat card thing a few years back. In fact I don't think I could have begun to do that project with today's eBay prices for these chaps. There must be thousands of them around, I guess people just love them and hang on to them. I did have a couple kicking around and managed to pick up a few broken models but it seemed that the best way forward would, like with my undead, be to find old-school still-in-production miniatures. This seemed quite difficult. Most of the available orcs were knock-off red era cartoony without being anything like as well sculpted. Those that caught the look exactly (like Knightmare Miniatures' Kev Adams-sculpted, ex Crooked Claw) are still too pricey for me to get more than a small warband's worth from, I may as well get the classic Citadel ones.

In the end I decided that rather than try and capture the Citadel look I should go for another orcy classic, Angus McBride's LotR illustrations. This was especially relevant as I've just got back into playing the ICE Middle Earth CCG and GW LotR skirmish game again.

Many years back I bought some Wargames Factory plastics to make an Angus McBride orc force, but they were really too spindly in my view to do the job well. For this attempt at an orcy rabble I turned to Alternative Armies, Ral Partha Europe, Denizen Miniatures (Paul Strivens goblins) and a Westfalia goblin that fitted nicely with the Citadel Monster Starter Set I'd wanted to paint for a while.

I think they turned out as a nice orcish rabble.

This is all I've managed for Orctober, I have another 40-ish orcs waiting to go (archers and boar riders mostly) but time is in rather short supply at the moment. Nor are these strictly finished, there are some details left to pick out and a couple of broken weapons still to fix. I want to put a big banner on the Monster Starter Set ogre. They'll do as my Orctober contribution though. :)

The orcs (and goblins) on the right are based on 20mm slottas and will probably count in WH as goblins but to my mind they are all orcs. After all, Tolkien didn't draw a clear distinction and there are clearly orcs and goblins of various sizes in his writings.

Orctober Fest 2019