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Everything is finished save for the runes in the Standard (and on about four shields). I need to finish the translations, which is not easy (Westron, which is based upon the Language of the Númenóreans is a combination of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Saxon/Goth - which when combined with Grimm's rules of Consonants makes for a more than difficult time of coming up with *words - a technical terminology "*words" are called "asterisks-words." They represent words in a language for which we have no actual existing instance of the word in any documents, but can be expected to be found in that language due to the rules of the language and similar words. We have proved the existence of a great many prior *words in Gothic, Saxon, Old English, Ancient Germanic, Celtic, etc. through the discovery of new documents or sources. Some have been exactly as expected, some almost, but the vast majority were exactly or close enough to what we expect to understand the accuracy of the *word system).

But..... I need to come up with a text, in debased Westron that says:

Great-Father/king Vulture-Bone Eater, elf-****er. (Tolkien would be appalled that I would create such a word).



So far I have:

Gattagagon Gulba Nongslaba .****Goloð

I figure that since Tolkien said that each grouping of Orcs tended to have their own language degenerate so that they were nearly incomprehensible to other Orcs, that bad translation would stand in for this degeneration.

I will eventually get close-ups of each element, when I get all of the trivial runes done on all of the shields, and the standard finished (Just noticed I need to paint the deceased decapitated skulls)


With that said.... Here are the finished Orc/Goblins

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Note to self:

Open the damned iris!

MB

Very nice work. I'd crop/rotate and centre the images a little more, but the models have come up very well. The blue-skinned orcs are much better to my eye now that they're dulled down. The freehand on the shields is very effective, and very impressive.

Nice work!

I still have one blue orc that is a bit too blue.

But I went through and made them all more of a grey-blue, so that it looks more like bluish highlights off a grey skin.

And, of course, the general figure is Grey-Skinned.

What is really pissing me off about these now, though, is that I am more and more leaning to the belief that the Orcs should be primarily of a single skin pigmentation save for the "Black Mordor Uruks" or the "Uruk-Hai" of Saruman, who were also darker.

But when I began these, it was before Peter Jackson had forever ruined himself to me by releasing The Hobbit.

After that, I began to drift further (or rather ran madly away) from anything he had done.

But the Blue Orcs date to the very first figure I ever painted, where I had to make my own paints out of glue and various things around the house (I made blue pigment out of flowers).

It was an Archive Hobgoblin that I got at my first job when I was 15, in 1978, and he got a blue skin, based upon a Goblin from the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit (sadly, still the superior film of the book).

But ever since then, I have been doing Blue Skinned Orcs/Goblins as both an homage to the first Tolkien movie, and to represent the "Black Uruks."

I am still trying to replicate the blue that I got on the drummer, which is the darkest, with the best highlights.

MB

I wouldn't worry about it. Humans have a pretty wide range of skin and hair pigments just in the space between Ireland and the "line" of Turkey/Ukraine/Finland, let alone North Africa. Tolkien's Elves also had distinct sub-races with different characteristics. And the origins of the Orcs (and men-goblins and goblin-men and half-orcs and so on) changed a few times including corrupted men, corrupted elves and so on that variation in skin tone seems to make perfect sense.

So your goblins are fine.

The variations of Middle-earth are not exactly that great.

While it is true there is some variation within the humans, the Elves are nearly uniform, save for their hair.

The Goblins/Orcs look OK, but I would still have preferred to go with a bit more uniformity in their skin tones.

I am doing this with the later units, which are getting the more yellowish-brown skin-tones as a rule. But I have already done several of the blue-grey, grey, and brownish-black ones.

When I get the Mordor Orcs finished (Sculpting), and do some Uruk-Hai, I might come back and correct some of the Darker Hithaeglir Orcs to lighten them up a bit.

And, this will also depend upon whether Tom Meier himself ever deigns to extend his fantasy lines a bit more to provide more complete lines.

MB