Collins does the defence of Minas Tirith

For some reason these things go for silly money on eBay! I expect they were £12-15 back in the day but now eBay has them going for anywhere between £40-70 on a regular basis, mental.

This is again mostly contrast (except faces) following previously documented methods and I’m happy with how they came out. I really like the strings having two colours on them to show some form of reinforcing or binding of the string or sinew.

the wood was aggaros dunes

string was gor grunta fur and gulliman flesh

metal was bolt gun metal and basilican grey

These rangers are full contrast painting. all the shading is reverse highlighting where I colour in the shadows rather than painting brighter colours on the high areas.

They took a little longer than I would have liked but they came out alright.

Just the characters from Osgiliath to go!

So I’m not thrilled with how these cloaks came out, the baby wipe material could pass for really weird fur or rough hessian but I don’t think it passes as cloth particularly well. The contrast paint didn’t flow into the folds of the fabric due to the ‘fluffiness’ of the baby wipe being far too attractive for the pooling nature of the paint.

I decided to mix up the colours to add a little bit of something something to the overall silver and black of the rest of then army.

all in all I won’t be using the baby wipe method again for this purpose.

Following on from the tests I did earlier I built and added wet wipe cloaks or bedrolls soaked in matt medium to the warriors with the aim of showing them as Osgiliath vets without buying the specific metal models.

I did start off trying to use PVA but I found it to be far too sticky and hard to mould to what shapes I wanted.

This was a cheats way of doing this to try and avoid using green stuff. it was quicker but it left a strange texture on the cloaks which might* be passable as really rough fabric, time will tell.

During the ‘sculpting’ stage I cut out isosceles trapezoids and the cut a semicircle out of the short (top) side where the neck of the cloak would be. I then glued the top of the cloak to the model with superglue and titivated the rest of it to a shape that was vaguely ‘flowing cape’ like. some worked well, others not so much.

*or might not

The bedrolls over the shoulders were a lot easier.

I simply cut long thin strips, soaked in matt medium and then rolled into thin sausages and bent over the models shoulder supergluing the meeting point at the hip.

another super simple paint job using the metal prime and contrast method from the warriors. quick and looks fine on the tabletop.

These pictures are a good example of how your iPhone tries to figure out the light balance and can get it wrong

Now for this I decided that I was going to go with quite a light colour for the wood. most wood is painted quite a dark brown as wargamers always go ‘oh wood, that’s brown’ getting confused between wood and tree trunks. sure there are redwoods and dark woods in the world but a lot of the strong hard woods eg oak, are actually quite light in colour.

agreos dunes was the contrast paint of choice used for this followed up with a tyrant skull dry brush to ‘silver’ it up a bit. I then went back in and added streaks of agreos dunes too try and add grain and disguise the fact its contrast paint. didn’t work well in some areas due to being too heavy handed on the first pass but never mind.

the metal was bolt gun metal and basilican grey wash. the rock bag was skeleton horde and the rope was gor grunta fur.

this is a quick paint job just like the rest of the force (contrast mainly) and so minimal effort involved. the hardest part was gluing it together and then pinning it to the base.

Basically did the same as all the infantry for this version of Faramir. I did opt however to buy him the optional upgrade of googly eyes for -5 pts

With only one sculpt of each weapon type for Osgiliath vets I decided to try and cheap out and utilise some of the regular dudes and mark them with capes and bedrolls to make them stand out.

Here we have a baby wipe cut up and soaked in matt medium. I didn’t let it dry but I think it might be best to use modpodge or PVA rather than matt medium.

Prime and paint would be an easy way for an all in one. I could also add them post painting by dying them with wash, that would also work but increases the risk of wash/ink going where you don’t want it

quite possibly the easiest model I’ve painted.

prime in white and then 3 shades of contrast (black, grey and white) in the reverse highlight (colour in the shadows) with the face and hands being painted with the standard GW flesh tones, bugman, cadian, Kislev and reikland. I did go one higher with palid wytchflesh though

First attempt at a list with what’s painted

• Gandalf the white sepia – 240pts
  • Shadowfax
• Peregrin Took – 30pts
  • elven cloak
• Captain of Minas Tirith – 55pts
  • shield
• 25 Warriors of Minas Tirith – 230
  • 8 sword & shield
  • 8 spear & shield
  • 8 bow & sword
  • 1 Banner and sword
• 7 Knights of Minas Tirith – 122
  • 6 shield
  • 1 banner

677 points total

All I’ve got to do now is learn how to play the game, play the game and decide whether it was all worth the effort!

Oh, and expand further on it, the captain and banners (foot and mounted) aren’t part of the battlehost box but picked up from eBay…

This was an interesting challenge for me in comparison to the other models.

Keeping Gandalf and Shadowfax both white whilst making it an interesting model meant one of them was not going to be white. I opted to make Gandalf the one that’s cream. to do that I used sepia wash and reverse highlighted. I think I did a better job on the mounted Gandalf than on foot. it looked ok in real life but under the Lightbox and through the camera lens shows how I completely went overboard and didn’t have any white primer left on the high points, especially the broad bottom of the cape at the back.

still I’m happy with the result and won’t redo it but I think I could do better.

These knights were painted using the same scheme and colours as the men at arms so really the only difference here is the horses.

Over a white prime I gave a thin coat of contrast to see where it pooled and then went back in and painted in additional shadows or dark areas to define muscles.  I see why people moan about painting the old GW horses because they are very flat.

my favourite colour for these turned out to be the flesh tone!

I wanted this project to be as easy as possible because I now have many draws on my time. time to break out the contrasts and use them as they’re intended.

primed in gun metal silver

basilicanum grey for the armour

black on the clothing and banners

Base colour = ushabti bone

wash = agrax earthshade

dry brush = terminatus stone

light dry brush = pallid wych flesh

Also a bit of facebooking gives you all the details about the wallpaper when its fresh from the shops.