Collins does the defence of Minas Tirith

With the steam running out on this project (or taken up by walking dead) I needed something to give me the umpf to get back into it. Cue another BOW/OTT challenge!

This time, the box has a perfect section just for this challenge, the actual ruins of osgiliath! the new part of this boxed set and the good excuse for GW to package it all up and call it a deal!

to be fair to them, the ruins are really well detailed and quite impressive given that I’ve not really looked at a GW kit for about 15 years (or rather not bought a new design/made GW kit).

I’ll add some trees to these to give it abit more ‘life’ in an overgrown way

Following all the previously documented steps for Minas Tirith armour it didn’t take too long to paint up these commanders and support troops. More gold was used than normal to pick them out as special amongst the rank and file.

It might make them an easier target for my opponent but really its all about looking about looking cool.

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.