The Shire and everything after: March 2022

Onto my next project and after a long while I’m returning to Warband Fantasy. A few years back I put together some Lord of the Rings lists for Warband (see here), and since then I’ve been meaning to build a couple of armies.

So, where would I get some suitable figures? As it happens over the years I’ve acquired a variety of pre-owned Games Workshop Lord of the Rings (GW LOTR) miniatures. I’ve already painted up a fair few of them, but there’s still heaps left.

I sorted out the orcs to see what I had. Seems like enough to put an army together.

Most of these figures have been pre-painted, and on closer inspection its clear that some have been painted once, and already sprayed over for a second coat!

These GW LOTR miniatures, in my view are low quality in terms of sculpt and finish. Recessed details are often bulging out, there are serious mould lines and mould slip issues, and some really poorly defined detail. I'm not sure what Games Workshop was doing with the design and manufacture on these, but compared to their own IP ranges, these LOTR figures could do with a qaulity improvement across the board.

Given this I have a choice – do I strip the paint off of these miniatures and start afresh, or just work with what I have? I’ve decided that I’ll just go with what I have, and paint over what’s there. It does mean the final finish won't be as good, and detail will be obscured by layers of paint, but I'm happy to accept that.

Previously, I’ve painted the LOTR figures I have as single miniatures as intended for the GW skirmish game. However, for these, I’m planning to base this up for Warband as units/vignettes, so painting them as a “mass” means I don’t need to take some much time and effort to make each one look good. This also helped in my decision just to crack on without paint stripping.

Using the Warband LOTR supplement, I’ve decided to build these as an Isengard army (with some allied trolls). Here’s the list I’ll be aiming at.

Edit 1:

A couple of hours work over the last few days and I've got the goblins done.

I've painted quickly and roughly over the existing paint, and I've not taken much time or care to produce a decent paint finish here.

This miniatures are going to go onto large bases in groups so I'm going for a quick and overall decent effect en masse here, and although they look a bt ropey individually, together once based, I'm sure they'll look acceptable.

I've also not done the bases, obviously, as they'll be discarded in favour of the mdf bases.

For the paint scheme itself, I've stuck to warm and earthy tones mostly, with various browns, and reds/pinks predominating.

For the skintones I've stuck to Tokien's original descriptions of orcs as "swarthy" and "sallow", using yellowish colours mostly, with a sepia wash.

The armour is made from a basecoat of dark brown, with orange splodged on and a heavy drybrush (overbrush) of dark metal to give the crude impression of rusted armour and weapons.

As I paint them, the low quality of the miniatures becomes more evident, but one thing with these goblins is interesting. They do look a little "elf-like", as the Jackson Lord of the Rings movies suggest!

Edit 2:

Onto these little fellows, the Uruk-Hai armed with pikes.

There's a debate to be had around what Tolkien meant when he referred to orcs armed with pikes of course, but these miniatures faithfully model Peter Jackson's use on film of Uruk-Hai with pikes at the attack on Helm's Deep.

With these miniatures however, I don't like them. The pikes are a weird mix of bendy and fragile, and for me they aren't what I want, which is something closer to this...

So I set about converting them from pikes to spears. This was a relatively simple process. I snipped the spears off, and cut them down to give me a shorter spear-haft.

I then drilled out the connection point at the hand using my old (and increasingly rusty for some reason) pin-vice. A dab of superglue and i pushed the cut down hafts back in - job done!

After 40 minutes of converting work I had the Uruk-Hai spearmen I was after.

Edit 3:

Including drying time, I've spent a couple of hours painting up the Uruk-Hai, and they're basically done. I still need to run a wash of Agrax Earthshade over them to tie the tone together, but they're good to go as they are.

Of course, the basing will be discarded and these will be grouped into three Warband Uruk-Hai units.

These sculpts again, are low quality, so I've not taken much care in slapping the paint on. the overall effect works fine without stressing too much over the neatness or the details.

Given the nature of the models, there's not much decision to be made over colour schemes, etc. Its mostly rusty metal and skin...ah, the Uruk-Hai skin.

Looking at the sources from Tolkien, the Uruk-Hai are sparsely described in terms of colour, with the references to them (unhelpfully) as "swarthy", which is very subjective and wide ranging in tone. Tolkien also describes them as "black orcs", but it seems unclear whether he is referring to their literal skin-tones or some measure of their character as dark or black-hearted.

Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings movie used rotoscoping for the orcs generally and gave them an odd sort of dark/black/khaki appearance.

By the way, I adore these Uruk-Hai and orcs. Bakshi gives them a truely disturbing "corrupted" countenance. I'd love some miniatures based on these!

This is similar to John Howe's iconic artwork, which also used the Zorn palette* and made the Uruk-Hai tan-coloured.

John Howe's artworks along woth Alan Lee, define the imagery we associate with Tolkien's literary masterpiece.

I considered going with this sort of colour, but decided against it. While "swarthy" can inlude the olive skintones of the Middle East, I wanted something darker.

Peter Jackson took a more literal approach making his movie Uruk-Hai black skinned, with hints of a red hue speckled in there.

Again though I swerved away from this for practical reasons (black armour, black skin, and black cloth makes for a dull miniature!) it was tempting.

In the end I chose a mix of kind of red/ochre/brown skin to stay wthin the general Zorn palette, but to provide a contrast in tone to the other orcs.

Overall, things are ticking along nicely, and I'm over 50% done with the painting now. I've got the main orcs, commander and shaman unit, and the two trolls to do. The trolls are going to need some work to get them sorted as they have a lot of gaps to the filled and some repositioning/pinning to be done. They seem to have been assembled using two-part epoxy, which has started to become a bit brittle. A connection broke while I was fiddling about with one of them, and the bond seems to have become slightly friable. I tested the other bonds though and they're stuck on good! Anyway, after that, I need to do the basing and this project will be done!

Edit 4:

OK, time for some basing. I decided to give the bases a bit of texture, and I had some old Polyfilla knowcking about. I'm not sure I mixed it properly though as it retained a kind of crumbly texture. Nil desperandum, however and I pushed on and...err...didn't take photos of the WIP stages sadly...

So here's the Pollyfilla stage. After it sort of cured, I coated it in PVA and covered it in basing sand, a bit of grassing and painted the edge. Job done.

Here's the 2 Scout units and 4 Orc Dregs units done.

Onto the Orcs, Shaman, and Leader. As some of these models were bare plastic/metal I needed to undercoat them so I just gave the whole lot a zenithal treatment.

The "metal" coat is underway...

Edit: 5

Pushing on, the orcs are all done and ready for basing.

Edit: 6

And finally, the orcs are on their bases and ready for battle.

The basic orcs of Orthanc

The army commander and his entourage

The orc shaman and his arcane braziers.

Uruk-Hai

More orcs of The White Hand

There's only the trolls left to do now, and these brutes are going to need some reconstruction and green stuff work to get them into a paintable state.

Edit 7: the final phase

Finally I got some time to sit down and finish off this project with the trolls. I forgot to take work-in-progress shots, but in brief, I fixed ip the trolls with some greenstuff, including a helmet faceplate as well as some extensive gap filling.

When it came to colouring the trolls, I reviewed the sources from Tolkien's books himself and it seems his description of trolls varied quite a bit, with stone grey, black, reddish brown all being mentioned. But the colour I chose was based on a couple of references to the skin being dark green.

Because these are larger, I spent a bit more time on them, so these two took about four hours to finish (not including drying time). I've also figured out the pollyfilla for the bases and these dried better than my earlier attempts.