5/12/2011: Lord of the Rings: Warriors of Minas Tirith

A bit late posting this but my internet was playing up yesterday...

These guys were a bit of a funny bunch for me because I painted them almost entirely in Games Workshop on Monday Nights when I've been going in, so I didn't do anything at home at all other than the undercoat. Actually the Dudley store is not a bad place to paint because the air in there tends to be quite dry, and therefore the paint and even the washes tend to be dry by the time you get to the end of the batch. The lighting's good as well, or at least I think it is. A career painter probably wouldn't but my alternative is the energy-saving lightbulbs at home, which do the job but it is true, they do distort the colours slightly!

here they are, resplendent in all their glory - my soldiers of Gondor. What made me want to do Gondor? Well, when I've collected armies in the past, and I'm talking specifically about when I worked for Games Workshop, I tended to just buy whatever I felt like and figure out how it was going to work in the army later. With Lord of the Rings, my army is Harad, and I didn't really know how to put an army together in the usual sense; War of the Ring was coming out and I wanted to do an army no one else was doing and use Mumaks. So far, I win about as many games as I lose, but I was always inspired by the Gondor army in the War of the Ring rules, and how they'd used a relatively limited pallette (We're talking 50+ colours I've used for painting my Harad,) to create an army that looks quite good.

What I didn't want to do was plan out my army list. Not being funny but I find that quite constricting. I also didn't want to put together an army on an ad hoc basis because it almost always turns out to be next to useless when I put it out on the gaming table. With the Gondor army, I've gone for the middle ground in between - I know what I want and don't want in the army, and I know where I'm going with it, but in the meantime buy whatever I feel like from the Gondor range and build the army up that way. It's hardly wrong to add more core choices to a War of the Ring army...

For painting them, I largely followed the guide in the Lord of the Rings rulebook. The more interesting parts are starting them off from a basecoat of Tin Bitz, to the point where one of the GW staffers thought I was literally doing the whole army in bronze. Actually, drybrushing Boltgun Metal over this and highlighting it with Chainmail creates a nice rusty effect, giving the impression of seasoned campaigners who've been in the forces a while, have been round the block and know the game. The other cool trick from the guide, which is conducive to the same effect, was to paint their sheilds a very dark grey rather than black, to give a worn impression. To be honest, black is rarely a good colour to use anyway if you're going for realism, and that's quite important in Lord of the Rings where the models themselves are true scale rather than heroic. Realistic is a rather flexible term to use when applied to models, but the LotR models do take themselves a bit more seriously than the Warhammer ones or 40K.

The one place where I deviated slightly from the guide was with the faces. For those, I used Tallarn Flesh, washed down with Ogryn Flesh, Dwarf Flesh for the mid-tone, Elf Flesh for the highlight and then a neat little trick that Griff taught me ages ago where you water down some more Ogryn flesh and glaze the face, which ties all the highlights together. Bearing in mind that a lot of those colours, plus some others used elsewhere on the models, were released after the Lord of the Rings rulebook was published, I think it goes to show that I've been learning quite a bit! Which is good because I find faces very hard to get right. Especially when most of them are covered with helmets...

That's about all I'm going to say about them. So, am I collecting these for Lord of the Rings or War of the Ring? The movement trays would suggest the latter, though if I'm honest I'm a fan of both. I'm thinking of Lord of the Rings at the moment, simply because I could play a simple game with the stuff I've got now; they just need a few additions like a banner and a hero. And on that note, the next step for the army is Faramir, who I'm painting now, and the Command secion, who I've just ordered.

Whether or not I'll get any games in is anybody's guess; the 82s are starting back up again soon so Monday Nights will become busy for me again before too long. If I get a night off then maybe.