I had a little break from painting last week, but back in the saddle this week with the first mounted Rohan warriors!
The riders were painted as per my last post, the focus for these and where I spent the most time was on the horses. I’m painting these one by one rather than coming up with a repeatable scheme, the goal being to have some nice variety there, but also to keep things interesting.
For each horse I looked up some photos until I found a colour that I found nice or interesting and tried to replicate it. I kept things on the simple side this time around, by mostly sticking to single colour coats, but I’m keen to try some more complex ones on the next batch of riders.
We’ve just entered a snap lockdown over here, which is unfortunate, but if last time around is anything to go by I should get a fair bit of painting time over the next few days.
The Middle-Earth motivation train is still rolling forward and showing no signs of slowing down! I’ve started building and painting the current starter set for the game, centered around the battle of Pelennor Fields, with Rohan and the Army of the Dead versus Mordor. I’ve wanted to do a Rohan army for a very long time, they are the focus of some of the most evocative scenes in the books/movies in my opinion.
For me Rohan means Riders of Rohan primarily, and I’m mostly excited about putting together a set of models that will let me represent Eomer’s exiled warband that serves as the relief force at Helm’s Deep and the charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor. These warriors on foot are most likely to be used as dismounted riders rather than starting models, which made them excellent test subjects for a colour scheme.
This army is less about a mad dash to the finish, and more of a passion project, so I’m planning on spending more time on the painting than I did on my goblins.
The rohan plastics are close to 20 years old now (I feel old!), and it shows with some pretty soft details in some places. Overall though the models do a good job of capturing the feel of the movies, which makes them enjoyable to paint. I’ve tried a new format for recording my paint scheme, based on what I’ve seen in some of the official publications, which hopefully is a bit more informative than just listing the paint colours in a paragraph. Feel free to let me know what you think about it or how it could be improved in the comments.
Next step is to get cracking on the rider models, there’s 12 in the starter set and I’ll need around 24 all up to put together the armies I’m interested in, which is a fair few horses to paint!
The excitement about Middle-Earth SBG has not died down yet, and after completing my dwarves I went around looking for more of the game’s models to paint. Turns out I had two of the Hobbit Goblin Town starter sets on my shelves, sitting with their contents unbuilt for many many years.
I don’t have any particular attachment to the goblin models, but I thought they would be a neat army to have ready for the tabletop, and likely easy to paint fast. After doing a stocktake of the models, I figured out I had 72 goblin warriors and 4 characters available to me.
I set out to paint them as efficiently as possible, keeping down the number of steps so I could get through the lot in as short an amount of time as possible.
To speed up the process I attached all the models to bits of cardboard so I could batch paint them as groups of five to eight models, and making it easy to get base colour and the skin wash down with an airbrush. I kept the models attached to the cardboard for all other steps apart from the basing, minimising the number of models I had to individually handle. Picking up and putting down 70+ models multiple times in a row actually adds up pretty fast!
As a rough guide, I used the airbrush to undercoat the models in a bone colour, then did a quick zenithal highlight with white to add a bit of depth to the models. I then turned the airbrush pressure right down and sprayed on GW Guilliman Flesh Contrast paint cut 50/50 with the GW Contrast Medium to not overly tint their skin colour (They’re very pasty in the movies). Then I switched to a brush and base coated the non-skin elements, which then had an GW Agrax Earthshade wash applied to them. For a final touch I applied some GW Carroburg Crimson wash to the faces and boils on the goblins, which added a bit more variation to the skin. The bases were simply done with Vallejo white texture paste, and then dipped into GW snow flock.
Overall I painted all of these models over the course of a week, which I’m very happy with from a time investment to end-result ratio. They’re not my best painted models by any stretch, but I do think they look cool as an army.
I painted the goblin king separately from the others, taking my time to get a better finish, as befits such an imposing model. He followed the same steps as the goblins, but I highlighted the skin back up afterwards, and added a few purple and red glazes to add a bit more variation in his flesh tones.
Lair of the Lagomorph 