Return of the King – Lair of the Lagomorph

You might remember that quite a while back I painted some Lord of the Rings Dead of Dunharrow, and said at the time that I’d built the army so I’d be able to slot in the three hunters and make it exactly 800 points. Well it took me a while (and waiting for those models to come back in stock!) but here they finally are.

These are the new plastic set Games Workshop produced for the trio, and like all the new Middle-Earth plastics they’re excellently detailed and go really nicely together. I’ve actually had these on my painting desk since December, with Aragorn completed and Legolas and Gimli only about half done. I finally decided to finish them off tonight after a few months of staring guiltily at them.

The paint jobs relied pretty heavily on contrast paints with some selective highlights over the top, with most of the leathers and cloth areas done that way. The main exception are the elven cloaks, which I decided to paint in a more traditional manner (basecoat – wash – highlights) with Vallejo Field Grey, GW Agrax Earthshade, and Vallejo Green Grey respectively.

I tried to add a bit of texture to everything with highlights, although to be fair I spent a fair bit more time on Aragorn than on the other two, and therefore he has much more texturing on his clothes! I suppose I can rationalise that by his being a ranger with presumably poor access to new clothes!

Part of the fun of finishing these three off was to be able to put them alongside the Army of the Dead and recreate that scene from Return of the King where they disembark from their stolen corsair ship. Although I lacked an appropriate photographic background so picked the one that matched their colours best.

Anyway it was nice to tie a bow around this particular Middle-Earth SBG army, and I look forward to using them in some games!

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:

The models were primed black (with the badger!)
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)
An all over drybrush of pure white, kept very light and really just there to pick out edges to finish the underpainting
Airbrushed an all over coat of Vallejo Game Air Escorpena Green to set the tone
From below, airbrushed GW Terradon Tuquoise to set the shadows
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!