The Dead of Dunharrow

This past weekend was Father’s day here in Australia, and during a fun family trip to the park a detour was organised to the hobby store for me to purchase a new airbrush. I’ve been using my Badger 105 for a little while now (maybe a year? can’t remember when I got it!) and it’s been great for a lot of things, and has seen regular use for undercoating and basecoating models. I’ve been trying to push my airbrush skills, and found that I really struggled to get smooth transitions and precise applications of highlights with the Badger. Cue a lot of research and I determined that to get smoother, more controlled results I was going to need a higher end airbrush with finer atomisation of the paint and a smaller needle. I settled on a Harder and Steenbeck Infinity, which is not cheap but a very nice piece of kit by all accounts. I was considering Iwata airbrushes as an alternative, but the tiny size of some of the pieces drove me away, I know how likely my fat fingers are to drop airbrush bits when disassembling! After a successful trip to the hobby shop I had my new airbrush, and all I needed was something to point it at.

I’ve been slowly painting the Riders of Rohan from the current Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game starter set (I’ll get them all done one day!), but haven’t yet touched the other half of the included good army: The Dead of Dunharrow. During my airbrush research I’d come across this tutorial from the Cult of Paint Youtube channel that had a great example of painting on the these dead warriors with an airbrush (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS_EoU1tGxw). Armed with the airbrush and a couple of playthroughs of the video I set about to painting these ghostly warriors.

Above you can see the finished result. 21 warriors, one mounted warrior (that’s been gathering dust for years), and the King of the Dead (also in the gathering dust for years category). I equipped this bunch so that adding Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli gets me to exactly 800 points using the “Return of the King” legendary legion (I don’t own the correct models for these yet, so the three of them will have to wait!). I picture this army as representing Aragorn and his army of the dead arriving at the Pelennor fields. To that end, I decided to base these models on cobblestones to represent abandoned Gondorian ruins. The bases were done using a textured roller I printed on my 3D printer.

The painting went smoothly and the new airbrush was a joy to use. The steps were relatively straightforward:

1. The models were primed black (with the badger!)
2. A mostly zenithal highlight was applied with white ink using the new airbrush (I say mostly as I did emphasize the head and shoulders of the models more than would normally occur in a straightforward zenithal highlight)
3. An all over drybrush of pure white, kept very light and really just there to pick out edges to finish the underpainting
4. Airbrushed an all over coat of Vallejo Game Air Escorpena Green to set the tone
5. From below, airbrushed GW Terradon Tuquoise to set the shadows
6. Applied a wash of Prussian Blue oil paint to the recesses of the model. This really helped define the deepest folds and detailing on the models that may have been washed out by the airbrushing.

Here are some close up photos of a few of the models:

Overall I’m very happy with the results, the mostly airbrushed look works well for ghostly models and they were a great crash course in the new airbrush. This was all a very quick turnaround too, I built the models Saturday night, painted them Sunday, and finished the bases a couple of hours ago!