Radagast’s Alliance

We have a small Middle-Earth SBG tournament coming up in a few weeks that I’ve planned on attending, and what better excuse to get more of my models painted! This tournament is limited to 400 points, which coincidentally is what Radagast on his sled and two giant eagles add up to! I’ve had these models since they were released (sometime around the release of the hobbit movies I assume), built and sitting in a case ever since. This seemed like a great opportunity to put some paint on them, and so off I went!

This is a three model army, and I have no idea how it will go in games but I hope it will be a lot of fun to play! I made the decision to experiment a bit with these models, and learned quite a bit in the process as I made quite a few mistakes that I hope not to reproduce!

For Radagast and his sled I used GW’s contrast paints primarily, the first time I’ve really experimented with these in their “intended” use, i.e. one coat that does basecoat, shading, and highlights. I’ve always found the MESBG models to take really well to washes due to their tight, small details (as opposed to other GW models that have a lot more large flattish areas), and was intrigued by how the contrast paints would work with them. The answer I think is really well. The rabbits are only painted with a single coat of 3 different contrast paints: Cygor Brown (Thinned down 50/50), Snakebite Leather, and Skeleton Horde. Radagast and the sled were also painted with contrast paints but were followed up with highlights of regular old acrylic paints. This model has a massive base, so I knew I wanted to make it a feature. I used a variety of Woodland Scenics foam flocks, and their more bushy clumping foliage. The flowers are tufts from Gamers Grass. The leaves are the usual seeds you can get for that purpose, I’ve had them for years and can’t remember where I got them. I had some issues with all this being pretty loose on the base and ran some thinned down PVA all over to glue it all down. This ended up drying all white in patches and made me very scared I’d just ruined the whole thing. No idea what happened there, but I ended up using some green contrast paint to tint the areas affected by this and they blended right back in, got very lucky there!

The rules for MESBG account for your mount being shot off under you, so it’s expected to have a dismounted version of any mounted models. Here’s my Radagast on foot, carrying his faithful hedgehog Sebastian. Painted exactly the same as the sled version.

The eagles were another experiment, I decided to try shading them with oils to cut down the amount of time I’d need to spend on highlights. This worked very well, but I made the mistake of being impatient and varnishing over the oils too soon, and ended up with a very unstable coat of varnish that came off with gentle rubbing! I left them alone for a few days, then went back over the white areas with some highlights and finally gave them another coat of varnish and that is holding much better. The lesson here: when painting with slow drying paints, don’t expect them to dry fast!

Overall I really like the look of the “army”. They were painted fast and there are definitely areas that suffered as a result, but I think they look nice and cohesive on the table.