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Thanks!

@CaptJake I followed the guide on the Duncan Rhodes website. Primed in wraithbone, painted metallics, washed metallics in 50/50 agrax lahmian medium, dryburshed metallics with wraitbone, then all over wash with 50/50 coelia greenshade and lahmian medium, and finally another wash of 50/50 biel tan green and lahmian medium. First time I've ever used lahmian but it works great

I don't mean to highjack this thread so this is the last until someone else shares some progress, but I'm making good strides on the boxset. Troll done and have 1/3rd of the orcs ready for wash phase.

I really enjoyed painting this guy and trying the leathery skin technique but I'm annoyed about the massive seam line in the leg, just wasn't able to get rid of it with what I had. Need to restock some greenstuff before getting another one:

All honesty, feel free to keep sharing your stuff if it helps you keep on track!

There's never a right or wrong way to share your work in these kinds of threads. LOTR is a game that has a rhythm and flow to people posting about it, in my experience, and when someone is really into it...they get really into it!

Love your stuff, please keep posting!

Does any one have the dimensions of the profile cards? I'm so tired of waiting for them to reappear, I'd rather make my own and have them properly printed.

In return, I shall bring forth photographs of my own miniatures before the end of the week.

Thank you, thank you.

It's been awhile since I posted anything, and a friend who I painted this for had sent me the picture...and I forgot I never uploaded it!

So here's Weathertop, with Nazgul that got matching bases sculpted.

A very good Weathertop.

That is very cool Kanluwen

Hello there, all. I've given myself a bit of a Corsairs of Umbar project to work on.

I've been working on it for a bit, I'll admit that the painted ones are by me. I'm not any great talent at painting, but I do plan on adding some washes.

They were boxed away for a bit but I'm ready to start again



Spoilered because the image was a lot larger than I expected it to be.

The colourful palette suits their background, I think. An Agrax wash would do wonders for sure, they'll look great.

 Oppl wrote:
The colourful palette suits their background, I think. An Agrax wash would do wonders for sure, they'll look great.

Agreed, they are characterful models, and the colours suit them, a wash to add depth will really help

Thank you both! I am glad that colors work, they're fun models to paint too.

My new washes are on their way, soon the pirates will have some more depth to them.

 boundless08 wrote:
I don't mean to highjack this thread so this is the last until someone else shares some progress

No, please. Keep going. Your stuff is fantastic!

I really enjoyed painting this guy and trying the leathery skin technique but I'm annoyed about the massive seam line in the leg, just wasn't able to get rid of it with what I had. Need to restock some greenstuff before getting another one:

What was your process for the trolls skin? I've struggled to find any guides on how to do the mordor troll skin.
And you're not wrong about the leg seam. That was a tough bugger to work out. Lots of filling and filing involved.


Kan- Love the Weathertop. It's one of my favourite sets from the movie. Not sure I'll ever be able to get one though. Just too expensive from FW.

Krij- Excellent pirates. Bright bold colours work really well for them.

Snrub:

I highly suggest it if you decide you might want one. They redid the mold a few years back. That one went together basically without issues. I know it's expensive, but it definitely felt worth what my friend had paid for it.


Additionally, it basically paints itself. That was an extremely low count on colors, two of which (Grey Seer and Mechanicus Grey) were just spraycans!

I might be doing Amon-Hen for him next year, and if I do? I'll make sure to post progress and WIP photos here.

 Snrub wrote:

I really enjoyed painting this guy and trying the leathery skin technique but I'm annoyed about the massive seam line in the leg, just wasn't able to get rid of it with what I had. Need to restock some greenstuff before getting another one:

What was your process for the trolls skin? I've struggled to find any guides on how to do the mordor troll skin.
And you're not wrong about the leg seam. That was a tough bugger to work out. Lots of filling and filing involved.

Cheers! I followed the video from the Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy so would recommend joining that but the base was bugmans glow with the dark bits at the back painted in dryad bark. Where the dark bits ended I stippled it out, then I washed the dark with agrax and the bugman with reikland. The leathery bits at the front were built up first using cadian fleshtone and then kislev flesh. I just thinned a lot on a small brush and painted in lines down the leg. At first it looks awful but you just need to trust in the process I suppose and it came out nice in the end

Kanluwen wrote:I highly suggest it if you decide you might want one. They redid the mold a few years back. That one went together basically without issues. I know it's expensive, but it definitely felt worth what my friend had paid for it.

Do you have any idea how much it weighed? Or how chunky the box was? Ive got a cousin who lives in the UK, given that its almost 200AUD cheaper to buy it there, I would consider having her ship it over for me. But the postage rate might kill the savings. Especially since FW offers free shipping on it.

I might be doing Amon-Hen for him next year, and if I do? I'll make sure to post progress and WIP photos here.

Keen for that! It looks like a great piece.

boundless08 wrote:Cheers! I followed the video from the Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy so would recommend joining that but the base was bugmans glow with the dark bits at the back painted in dryad bark. Where the dark bits ended I stippled it out, then I washed the dark with agrax and the bugman with reikland. The leathery bits at the front were built up first using cadian fleshtone and then kislev flesh. I just thinned a lot on a small brush and painted in lines down the leg. At first it looks awful but you just need to trust in the process I suppose and it came out nice in the end

Thanks for the run down! I might have to give Dunc's tutorial a gander then. The end results are excellent.

The knobbly bits on the trolls legs look great.

Natural and also just a little gross.

 Snrub wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:I highly suggest it if you decide you might want one. They redid the mold a few years back. That one went together basically without issues. I know it's expensive, but it definitely felt worth what my friend had paid for it.

Do you have any idea how much it weighed? Or how chunky the box was? Ive got a cousin who lives in the UK, given that its almost 200AUD cheaper to buy it there, I would consider having her ship it over for me. But the postage rate might kill the savings. Especially since FW offers free shipping on it.

Asking the hard questions, lol...

I think it was 3-4 lbs? Maybe 6 on the high end?

Surprisingly it came in bags only, no boxes!

Two weeks ago, amid frugal Christmas present-making (as befits a Dwarven tightwad), Johan von Elak, a friend of mine, decided that we should meet up in the days between Christmas and New Year, and play Lotr Strategy Battle Game. He had been introduced to the system by a friend, and fell for it. Having tried Lotr SBG, he wondered why he had played clunky Warhammer with its bloated mass of special rules all these years, when such an elegant fantasy wargame existed.

Be that as it may, me and my brother were fired up with enthusiasm. We have collected Lotr for as long as we have collected Warhammer, and the wonderful miniatures and especially Games Workshop's homebrew designs for Lotr (Dwarves, Khand, Easterling Cataphracts and so on) have long captured our imagination. The Perry twins truly know their craft, and they gave us a phenomenal model range to crown their work for Games Workshop before they took their leave to focus on their own historical range. Yet Lotr players around here are few and far between, and no tournament has ever been sighted. As such, our modelling efforts have by necessity become concentrated on Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40'000, which do have players and tournaments. Absolutely lovely as those settings and miniatures are, this has still left us longing for Lotr, even as we piled the boxes and blisters of our Lotr collection higher.

And so, after 18 years in the hobby, we at last have found opponents and a communal drive to convert and paint our Lord of the Rings miniatures!

While Johan goes for the elite forces of Mordor, and my brother paints Easterlings, I have spent at least 8 days of nonstop work from morning to midnight on converting my Dwarven warband for the Christmas games to come, based on the rather shoddy plastic kits. Painting will happen in preparation for some later Lotr event, and so I present to you pictures of these finished conversions. Time was short, and so I declined to work in all the angularities and intricacies I would have loved to do. Drawing inspiration from Games Workshop's own Lotr Dwarf range and from the splendid artworks of Sergio Artigas, I set about decorating the Dwarves. Most importantly, I went for my lifelong love of realism details, and frontloaded their equipment. I also drew on certain Warhammer Dwarf designs such as ancestor faces, because good designs should span settings and not be confined in their outreach.

It is far from perfect work, yet it was not meant to be anything else than fast work, though still completionist in scope of equipment and decorations. These are just quicksculpted personal conversions, not sculpts for casting.

In the process I also happened upon a simple method to give a base for making flapping cloaks, involving plasticard, pinned paper clips, super glue and baking soda. A tutorial can be arranged if the below work in process pictures do not suffice for an explanation: Say the word!

It is so good to at last be back not only to true Dwarven hobby work, but also to Lotr.

And now, heed the blasts of horn!



















Cloak making:





Cheers!

Oh, wow, that's something very special indeed!

 Slinky wrote:
Oh, wow, that's something very special indeed!

Agreed!

KNC, you might want to try to track down a copy of "Shadow and Flame". It has a full runic alphabet for the Dwarfs of Middle Earth in there!

Very, very good greenstuff work and the banners look suitably dramatic.

Thank you kindly folks!

@Kanluwen: Oh, I've got Shadow and Flame alright. GW's first Lotr supplement, released during Two Towers. I was astonished to discover the new models and supplement in the hobby store when they were released, and for once splashed out money on all the new Dwarven wonders and Goblin fun. Lovely supplement, lovely miniatures.

Thanks for reminding me about the runic alphabet! Good catch. I'll dig it out for sure. My precious.

Cheers

I've been trying to find where the heck I put my Armies of Middle-Earth book, found Shadow and Flame instead...so I had just been reading it when I saw your post!

@Kanluwen: What a jolly coincidence!

Khrake and Taghimbur of Zirak Zagul

When I last painted my Warhammer Dwarfs of Karak Norn and similarly blue-red coloured Lotr Dwarves over twelve years ago (hobby work on my friends' and brother's stuff, plus Chaos Dwarfs, Squats and sculpting for casting has kept me away from my core love in the hobby), I was relying upon a black undercoat and inks, with careful highlighting. This took time to paint but delivered stark results. The problem is that most of our Citadel inks have been used up, spilled or dried up, and no replacement inks can deliver the same strong results. As such, I tried to approximate my usual painting style as best as I could with washes (lovely paints, by the way). This proved tricky, since several of my staple paints were either half dry, or out of commission and in need of replacement shopping.

As such, instead of Shadow Grey and its current equivalents, I had to mix dark grey and blue for my blue-grey bases. Likewise, I had to skip Ice Blue/Lightning blue (although I did find a bottle of the latter after highlighting all the blue, fresh and good to use), and applied Space Wolves Grey straight onto Enchanted blue, hoping to pull it together with blue wash. The most time-consuming challenge was the state of my dried up Shining Gold. I considered mixing Mithril Silver into Gehenna's Gold, but noticed that the clumsy dried-but-water-mixed Burnished Gold could still be used for highlights, with a lot of patience. Most colours I highlighted up to their starkest (orange for red, Bleached Bone for skin and so on), and then pulled the bright highlights into the base colours with a wash (red-brown Reikland Flesh for both skin and red cloth, for instance). All bronze/gold and iron/silver areas were given a re-highlighting, but this time I refrained from re-highlighting the entire model after washing/inking as I always used to do, because while it delivered crisp results, it also took a lot of time to pull off. If I shall have any hope of ever fielding a fully painted warband, I need to cut down on re-highlighting after applying washes.

The result is sufficiently close to my usual way of painting Dwarves, with washes instead of inks and a lot less of re-highlighting.

These two test pilots of painting have their names written in the runic Dwarf alphabet/futhark found in Shadow and Flames.



Runic reference:

That's a beautiful blue color.

Those are awesome. Do you have an Instagram or YouTube where I can see more of the sculpting process?

Incredible work in here. Wow!

I went with a more corporeal look for my Army of the Dead/ Black Numenoreans

That's a really cool look for those minis, nice work!

I just like the idea of using the dead warriors are Black Numenoreans.

Purple wood painted shields are great too, they contribute to the overall frigid and evil feel.