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Is it just me, or is the quality of the painting on the LOTR models on the Game Workshop site really poor?
Is like they got told they had to paint the whole range in a week, did 90% of the models in 2 days, and then spent some time on the rest. Is their any real reason for this? As on the whole the painting standard is really good.

I think a lot of it is they are striving for realism.

The LOTR models don't have the bling or cartoony/colourful/edge highlight schemes the vast majority of 40k and fantasy have, they are mostly muted natural colours with minimal extreme highlighting so they look pretty bland and simple.

Got any links to any that seem really badly painted though? The above was just the impression I got from browsing the site.

Nah, it's just you.

Seriously, though, let's take the Witch King on Fell Beast model as an example. Compare the metal- dull in the flats, shiny along the creases and dinged-spots- to the same sort of area on an ork battlewagon. There's just not as much area on the Witch King as on the battlewagon, so it seems rather jarring. But now look at the wings on that Fell Beast! I've tried to match that paint job, and it is really difficult. There are a lot of subtle transitions that you just can't get with a base coat, a wash, and a couple of passes of drybrushing.

I'll grant you, the dragon is pretty bland, but the Cave Drake has a lot of subtle detailing. Most of the pictures of troop models are very good- these were painted to be the 'beauty shots' for adverts, after all. The Khandish warriors, Haldir's elves, even the basic Dwarf warriors, they're all fine.

Perhaps it is the difference between the heroic 28mm (as Ifalna says, cartoony) scale of Fantasy/40K, and the smaller, more subtle true-scale 25mm of most of the LotR figures.

Jeeze, I used 'subtle' three times in this post. I need a thesaurus.

I think a bit of it may be that the photographs are more zoomed in on smaller miniatures where the detail is a bit harder to reach. 40k/Fantasy models are larger with more of the cool details picked out and sculpted out of proportion to grab attention. LotR models are more realistic and don't have the same kind of exaggeration of detail.

I'd go with Fellblades last comment. The models are smaller. Ever tried painting a Moria Goblin? Don't bother picking up anything that isn't a fine brush.

Its probably just the smaller detailed areas like faces that are really not quite that good. There is probably not as much sub-standerd as i thought :S

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat460013a&prodId=prod1070087
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?prodId=prod1500001

Things like those, i think could have been done better. But yes its probably not that bad...

Have you looked at the second examples face on the larger pic? The way they've painted the facial expression together with the small details around the fig, that is really excellent painting. I guess you have just different taste in painting than is present in the LotR line of figs.

Metsuri wrote:Have you looked at the second examples face on the larger pic? The way they've painted the facial expression together with the small details around the fig, that is really excellent painting. I guess you have just different taste in painting than is present in the LotR line of figs.

It's probably just the sculpt, that's one of the ugliest faces I've ever seen on a model.

The face on the Boromir on horseback looks ugly, but the Boromir on foot looks awesome. Elrond's face doesn't look amazing, but the level of shading they got on such a tiny surface is impressive.

Ok it was just me then
Its probably just because the LOTR figures i have seen in person painted (by my Step-Dad, who used to get the LOTR magazine every week or month with the GW figures) are extremely good. But probably took 10 times longer to paint as well.