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I'm sure there will be a part of Gondor (or at least a unit) that could feasibly use a trisected flag with a star on it. Might need to change the colours slightly though, I imagine.

I was thinking more about belt buckles for your troops.

Banner-sized belt buckles.

I'd probably have to greenstuff some appropriate-sized codpieces.

 Azazelx wrote:
I'd probably have to greenstuff some appropriate-sized codpieces.

Why? I said "Texas".


PS: I'm going to have to steal your goblin eye technique. Love the look. Your morghul knights also look great: sinister and colorful at the same time without even using the color red.

Because "banner-sized"? Thanks for the compliments on the gobboes, it seems to approximate the movie's eyes well enough while also standing out. The Morghul Knights aren't mine, sadly. They're a guy called Joshuar_au's and I intend to rip them off as well.

Apparently I need to read your thread a little more closely than I read Lord of the Rings.

It's been awhile, but I have some more stuff finished and to show (finally!)



I finally finished these Goblin Prowlers last weekend after starting them about a month ago during my Moria Goblin push. Unfortunately, and, I guess rather predictably, I got sick of painting Moria Goblins, and they sank to the back of the front of my queue. I took them to work a couple of times. but there were just too many of them to get anything substantial done, so they sat for a little while. I finally split them into two groups and took them to work last week to get stuff done in a more focused manner, and then finished them off on the weekend.

As with this sort of thing, I put more effort into these than I do with faceless plastics, but still - they're not exactly models that inspire my top-tier paintjobs. I also wanted them to look grotty and grubby, so after my usual highlighting and shading I gave them a glaze/wash of AP Soft Tone. One commentator remarked at one point that they felt that the Moria Goblins were Ochre rather than Green, but my reviewing of both stills as well as and statues and other such merchandise makes them pretty well green. Though it's more of a light olive. I'm using Citadel Foundation Gretchin Green (sadly discontinued) as a base, then highlighting it with blends into VGA Rotting Flesh. They do blend upwards into yellow-greens, but Ochre really seems to be something based off this particular still, which can be found with more than one tone to it anyway. Either way, this tone fits the Moria mob much more than the traditional Goblin Green of my (and many other) WHFB Orcs and Goblins.

Both pics here just pulled from pages on the intarwebs, with no touch-up by myself except for resizing and renaming.


How Green is my Goblin?


All depends on the light or filter, I guess?



In Kings of War they'll be part of my Goblin army, though I couldn't find an appropriate unit for how they're armed - and the actual goblin infantry all seem to be listed as pretty much rabble.



Since this simply won't do, I'll be using the unit profile of a KoM unit - either Foot Guard with 2-handers or perhaps Berserkers - it works legally as the armies can be allied anyway, and it thematically fits the unit. I'll be doing a similar thing with the Gundabad Blackshields when I get around to doing them (probably "regular" Foor Guard). My only real issue is that even Goblin Kings in KoW are Yellow-Bellied, so it'll be a bit odd to have their Elites braver than their leader. Then again... even that kinda works thematically as well if you think about it...



12 for a Regiment of "20", and two leftover for other duties and fill-ins. Unfortunately with only three sculpts there are no fancy-pants models to be banner bearers or leaders, but such is life. Let's face it, I'm way too slack to convert any for this mob! More pics over on the Wordpress for anyone interested in more individual shots rather than the unit-based ones.

Having only ever played one game of LOTR (and it was a simple intro game to boot) are Prowlers the elite of the Moria goblins?

They're a kind of elite, yes. The problem is that so many of the LotR profiles are scattered across so many supplements, not to mention being affected by the order of release, etc. They can be armed with "normal" goblin weapons or bows as well, but the actual models are just these three sculpts, so I decided to bulk them out enough for a KoW regiment, and it'll also work well enough for any SBG needs I might have.

Looking good! The skin tone looks fine to me!

Very nice Prowlers there! Nicely painted and based! I love seeing pics of painted figs!

Bravo!

Thanks guys

I've fallen behind on my LOTR stuff since life has been a bit hectic the last few weeks. Kids all have their coursework in now though so I will try to get back to it.

You've done a great job on those prowlers. I have a bunch of them, and they're not the easiest models to get a nice job on, but yours is good enough to make me think mine need a repaint. I usually mix skin tones on my LOTR goblins though your olive/green looks really nice.

the very last (and now being discontinued) army books (Mordor, Moria & Angmar, The Fallen Realms, Kingdoms of Men, and Free Peoples) had all of the stats for everything, released circa 2010-2012.

Thanks Doug. I think I have several of those - and at least a couple in paper form!


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 Da Boss wrote:
I've fallen behind on my LOTR stuff since life has been a bit hectic the last few weeks. Kids all have their coursework in now though so I will try to get back to it.

You've done a great job on those prowlers. I have a bunch of them, and they're not the easiest models to get a nice job on, but yours is good enough to make me think mine need a repaint. I usually mix skin tones on my LOTR goblins though your olive/green looks really nice.

Thanks! I know what it's like when work piles up. My own is about to hit one of those times a year when there's lots of extra work to do at home as well as the normal stuff we do in the workplace. I've used mixed skin tones on my LotR Orcs, though I'm going more uniform with the Moria Goblins. Not sure about what I'll do when I get to the Misty Mountains/Hobbit ones yet.

I'm firmly in the "not green!!!" camp when it comes to LOTR goblins, but I can overlook that in the face of a really nice paint job like that.

To be honest, I don't mind how Orcs and Goblins look. I loved the look of them in Peter Jackson's Hobbit & LOTR. But then Green looks pretty mean if it's done right.

 mdauben wrote:
I'm firmly in the "not green!!!" camp when it comes to LOTR goblins, but I can overlook that in the face of a really nice paint job like that.

The thing is that I'm painting their skin tones based very much off all the media and merch from the film. Much of which was created by or with their involvement of WETA - so it's actually pretty accurate - And nothing to do with GW.

Only the tones you think are green, "from the movie," aren't.

They are from photos that have had their color values tinkered with post-production.

If you get a screen capture from the Extended Release DVD of the movie, you will see that their skin is a pale yellowish skin-tone.

Take a screen capture, load it into photoshop, and then take a sample of the skin-tone, and then flood an empty file layer with that color and you can see that it is NOT Green very easily.

In fact, you can get the RGB values and then ask a color sampler online "Is this "x" color?" (where x=green in our case) with the given RGB values, and it will give you a Y/N.

A LOT of the online images have been through several different means of getting posted to their websites that do not preserve the actual color values of the image.

This is the difference between your cheaper scanners, or screen-capture programs and the professional quality apps or equipment.

I did not learn this until a couple of years ago, when talking to a professor at UCLA who taught Photoshop and Maya for Production (I audited the classes).

Rather than using ONE photo for the Moria Goblin's skin tones, you might want to take a look at what they look like in natural light.

MB


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As an example.

Notice that the skin isn't green but is rather a pale ochre color, with some darker impetigo blemish-colored spots.

Again, if you take a color sample of what you think is green, and then flood fill a photoshop layer with it, to get a better idea of what color it really is then you will find that the darker shades (mistaken for green) are actually blue-grey in color.

This will have a tendency of making us THINK we are seeing "greenish," simply because of the illusion of the Mach-bands created by the yellow and blue being next to each other. Like black and white next to each other will create darker and lighter Mach-bands of color at the connection of the two shades (white/black being tints/shades and not "colors"), actual colors will create Mach-bands that are an intersection on the absorption or emission spectrum of the two colors (depending upon the medium). With blue and yellow, this is typically green to our eyes.

So... The green on the Moria Goblins is an optical illusion.

MB

So... Painting them green would be a shortcut to reproducing that optical illusion?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
So... Painting them green would be a shortcut to reproducing that optical illusion?

Good point, to a point.

At the level of scale we are talking about, that might be considered as a way to go about portraying them.

But it is not too difficult to reproduce the actual effect using the proper colors.

Using a yellow-ochre base, with a blue-grey wash, and then highlighting back with the yellow-ochre, and then pale-ochre on top of that will produce a similar appearance that will not be so harshly.... Green.

I have spent the last couple of years (or probably decade) trying to reproduce the skin textures of the movies (I thought, for Jackson's first Trilogy, that using Impetigo as a means of showing the Orcs as being "degenerate" was an imaginative move on his part - although perhaps insensitive).

But getting the look to look right has been a real challenge,

Using makeup sponges is a requirement to get the mottling. But it needs to be done sparingly on something that size.

But when successfully done, it provides a vastly more appropriate and appealing (in terms of getting the imagery of the first trilogy, where Jackson did not horribly mutilate Tolkien's works) appearance than doing a straight coloration for the Goblin and Orc flesh.

It is a bit of work, though, which requires more than just the base-color, wash, and highlights.

It requires a sub-base mottling (in a dark color, which will show through the base-color), then the base-color, and then a mottling of a much more contrasting (lighter) color over the areas with the sub-base mottling. Then the normal shading wash, which itself will be "blotted" as it dries by dabbing at the high-areas with the makeup sponge. Then doing a highlighting, and a touch of subtle mottling.

If I was better at shooting video, I would do a tutorial. But so far, I have only got the technique to work on the last seven models I used it on, before giving up on the movie depictions (for the most part - I do intend to return to them eventually) and working on the Thunderbolt Mountain, Ral Partha, and my own sculpts of Orcs/Goblins which adhere more closely to Tolkien's depictions.

The Moria Goblins from the first Jackson movie are perhaps the only depictions of Orcs he get "right" in terms of Tolkien's descriptions from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the essay "On Orcs" from The History of Middle-earth, vol X: Morgoth's Ring. They have a pale skin from living underground (as opposed to the ruddy skinned Orcs from Mordor or the Northern Hithaeglir, which tend to live more in the open), and they are more "bent" than his depictions of other Orcs (at the time, it would have been too expensive to give the Orcs a digital makeover to shorten their legs).

Azazel's Moria Goblins are beautiful, and the greenish tint isn't the kiss of death or anything. I am just ridiculously pedantic about Tolkien.

MB

I'm not using one photo. I'm using multiple sources, including still and a number of merchandise items from WETA/Sideshow/etc. There might be more involved ways to get a similar effect, though I can't say I care, though, as my aim is to paint them more-or-less as they appear in the films as quickly and as easily as possible. Or to put the point that Bob just made another way - in the same way that the Xenomorphs from Aliens appear to be silvery-black-grey, the actual film props were "cockroach brown". I'd add some links, but I'm sure you know all about that anyway - and it's easily google-able.

Just as you're quite pedantic about Tolkien and everything related, Moria Goblins are so very low on my "give a gak" scale - so getting them done to this reasonable standard as quickly and easily as possible is my only priority with them. It comes back to my ethos of thousands of models to paint, and only so long left to live. Your suggested method, which might well work nicely, comes under the "too much effort" category given the status of these Goblins in my collection and preference for general consistency amongst them. I'm wanting to clear the decks and have every single one of my Moria (and Gondor) models painted by the end of this year. That's a half-dozen or less sprues worth of the plastics, a few heroes, and a shaman/wardrum that I still need to purchase. Maybe add some Wargs and Warg Riders, which will work with them on the table even if they're not strictly speaking part of the same force, and call it a job done. Then I can concentrate properly on the half-painted Gondorians, and then the unpainted Gondorians. All while concentrating as much as possible on finishing the endless hordes of half-painted models that I've accumulated over the past couple of decades. 7 Months isn't an especially long time for all that...

 Azazelx wrote:

 mdauben wrote:
I'm firmly in the "not green!!!" camp when it comes to LOTR goblins, but I can overlook that in the face of a really nice paint job like that.

The thing is that I'm painting their skin tones based very much off all the media and merch from the film. Much of which was created by or with their involvement of WETA - so it's actually pretty accurate - And nothing to do with GW.[/spoiler]

Eh. To me, those examples you posted don't look green. They don't look like "human" skin tones, but they don't look green. I suppose it could be argued that in the "atmospheric" lighting used by Jackson in many of the scenes some of the orcs and/or goblins might appear to be greenish. Maybe I'm just trying to hard not to see them as green? Personally, aside from the Uruk-hai, I try to give my O&G somewhat... realistic(?) skin tones using various paint colors in the brown-tan-khaki-fleshtone range.

In any case, I'm certainly not trying to tell you how to paint your figures, or saying they are "bad" or "wrong" becuse they are green. My original comment was really meant more as a joke, but I guess that didn't come across. Plus, as I said no mater what color their skin is you did a bang-up job on painting those miniatures!

 mdauben wrote:

Eh. To me, those examples you posted don't look green. They don't look like "human" skin tones, but they don't look green. I suppose it could be argued that in the "atmospheric" lighting used by Jackson in many of the scenes some of the orcs and/or goblins might appear to be greenish. Maybe I'm just trying to hard not to see them as green? Personally, aside from the Uruk-hai, I try to give my O&G somewhat... realistic(?) skin tones using various paint colors in the brown-tan-khaki-fleshtone range.

In any case, I'm certainly not trying to tell you how to paint your figures, or saying they are "bad" or "wrong" becuse they are green. My original comment was really meant more as a joke, but I guess that didn't come across. Plus, as I said no mater what color their skin is you did a bang-up job on painting those miniatures!

No worries mate, though the (spoilered) merchandise examples from Sideshow and WETA above are very definitely in the green spectrum in my books - though a far cry from the typical greens used in GW models, which I tried to mimic in a quick and easy fashion with my LotR models. They're a little exaggerated of course, in the same way that my Minas Tirith models have an almost "shining silver" tone of plate, rather than the grimy grey steel of the films. Or my "clean" looking blue-grey Gandalf when compared to the dirty, black-grey Gandalf of the films. (You can see both on the first page of this thread).

Hopefully I can force myself to finish the last few Moria Goblin unit commanders this weekend. Then I can photograph them and drop them into their units' movement trays...


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Hurk! While cleaning up my painting desk a little looking for orange paint I found a little baggie. Good news and bad news - good news was that it had 2 Moria Goblin Shamen in it (I knew I had some of those little bastards somewhere!) The bad news was 2 more MG Captains (and I'm a little over painting those bloody things.)

 Azazelx wrote:
Hopefully I can force myself to finish the last few Moria Goblin unit commanders this weekend. Then I can photograph them and drop them into their units' movement trays...


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hurk! While cleaning up my painting desk a little looking for orange paint I found a little baggie. Good news and bad news - good news was that it had 2 Moria Goblin Shamen in it (I knew I had some of those little bastards somewhere!) The bad news was 2 more MG Captains (and I'm a little over painting those bloody things.)

Heh! I think I've got a double set of the old Moria Goblin plastics from the original FOTR game box, all waiting to be painted. Plus captains, shamans, drummers and the king. I'm not at all looking forward to painting all those little buggers.

I need to buy a drum set or two. Probably one - might convert a second. I'd forgotten about Trolls and even a/the Balrog. I guess i can add those after the mainstay of goblin grunts.

I just counted my sprues of Moria Goblins, and the loose ones.

I think I am going to need to sell some Moria Goblins, because I found 48 Sprues of Goblins, and around 180 loose ones.

I did not realize that I had bought so many.

And, I do not have nearly enough of the guys with the two-handed axes (I have four of them).

But I do have plenty of Shamans.

I think maybe I will paint up some basic Moria Forces (groups of between 24 and 28 miniatures, including leaders) to sell on eBay.

BTW, the miniatures look good, even with the green skin.

The Moria Goblins remain one of the few things with Jackson's Middle-earth that "work." It is a pity he did not stick with that aesthetic in The Hobbit films.

MB

I've just gone to check the storage tub where my Moria Goblins live. It turns out I have 11 sprues worth, so that makes 132 more of the little bastards. Not nearly as many as you have, but many more than will be fun to paint.

44 each of Spear, Bow and Blade. That makes 4x bases of 11 of each (allowing a metal figure as their leaders) for a total of 12 more regiment bases worth of models, so I'll need to work out how many more captains I need. I should (hopefully) be mostly ok-ish for Swords and Bows, but I know I'll be way short on metal Spear Captains. Funny thing is that 11 sprues works out perfectly for my current method of having all but one of the figures on a base be plastic with a metal "leader". 4 bases of each that I can combine in pairs or quads to use as larger units, plus the stuff that's already painted might well be enough for KoW at least. I like a lot of faceless infantry, but I also need to leave space for the cooler stuff like trolls and wargs. (And maybe that Balrog!)

Annoyingly, both shamans I have are the same sculpt, though I'm not sure how many are considered "normal" or "decent" in either SBG, WotR or KoW goblin armies. I might get the named one if I can find it in metal. The 2h axe Goblins at least come in blisters of 4 now, so they're a little easier to get in numbers.

I do agree with you on the aesthetics of the Moria Goblins to the Misty Mountains ones in the films. I've got 4 sprues of the Hobbit ones, plus whatever you get in the (unopened) boxed game. I'll decide whether to paint them as melanin-deficient albinos or continue with the Moria look sometime down the line. After I've painted all of these ones...

Suddenly my entire Moria force of 24 unpainted Goblins and Durburz doesn't seem so bad...

With the shamans, I'd be sure to give them noticeably different schemes. Not only will it make them less repetitive, but you could then use one as a Gundabad Blackshield shaman, who have a different spell set to the Moria ones. I can't recall which one had Fury, but that's the best. The other had an earthquake spell which was tricky to line up, but could do serious damage in a one-shot wonder.

I may actually have one of those Gundabad Shamans. I've got a few of the Gundabad models, though I've forgotten exactly what. Looks familiar, though.

Still, you can only make one of these little things so distinct.

At least when you're trying to maintain a pretty uniform appearance amongst the entire clan. I'll probably end up with one of the other sculpt, though, if I purchase the overpriced Moria Goblin Commanders box (since I also want the drum). I'll use the drum as an army standard, and have to figure out what I'll use for more of them, since I sure as hell won't be buying two of those boxes at AU prices...