Sam’s Shire Hobbits

It is time! My aim for this army was to get the Shire painted in time for their second tournament. After a week of hurried basing and frantically painting new additions (thanks mum for the early birthday present), I did it! I proudly arrived in Dublin with a fully painted Shire army, ready for battle.

It was a doubles tournament and my partner for the games was my friend Colleen, who fielded Treebeard, Radagast on an eagle, Tom Bombadil and Beorn. Thus the Middle-Earth Hipster Alliance was born!

Our first match was against The White Council, a full force of characters all charged up to the gills with magic. It… proved one-sided.

No matter. next we were up against Isengard. Despite some truly epic moments (such as a shirif tanking an Isengard siege ballista bolt to the chest!), we didn’t prove much more successful than we had before.

Gundabad came next. Surely the Defiler’s forces would be no match for the might of the Shire!

Turned out yes, yes they were.

Probably one of the models I have been most proud of has been Gandalf’s cart. I absolutely love this model and I think I did a really good job with Gandalf, following a painting guide in one of the old Lord of the Rings sourcebooks.

However, his cart was very lackluster, so I went back and painted it and the horse up, following a guide I found in the Projects.

We had a visit from a very kind community member lately and he brought us some Christmas presents!

Having heard that I was using a proxy for Bill the Pony, he brought me the rare-as-hen’s-teeth miniature itself.

I cannot tell you how happy I am to get this miniature, complete with Samwise offering Bill a carrot. I immediately took it home and painted it up.

It’s a little later than I intended, but here, at last, is my guide for painting the most disliked Hobbit in the Shire.

Starting off, I painted her skin, before painting her umbrella and hair in a base black.

For any white sections of clothing, I painted them in a thin coat of grey, which gave me a good degree of shadow to work on later.

I selected the rest of her base colours, painting her dress a dark blue. While her “official” colour scheme has her in earthy browns, I enjoyed painting Lobelia as she gave me a chance to step away from the more down to earth colours of the rest of the army. After all, Lobelia is definitely not some common labouring Hobbit.

I next added a thin cream layer over the greys. This gave me the colour I wanted to work with, while the grey provided nice, deep shadows to the folds in the fabric.

I gave it all a very light wash with some Dark Tone, but I didn’t like how muddy this made it and tried to keep that as thin as possible.

I also added a dark blue layer to her umbrella.

After this, it was all down to shading. I added strong, bright highlights to counteract the muddy effect of the wash and make the colours pop out more. her hair was then dry-brushed with a base of grey. I later went back and touched it up again with a brighter layer to give her that appearance of the grey-haired harrigan everyone knows and hates from the books.

Nearing the final stage, I dry brushed her umbrella with a grey to make it look dusty and then highlighted the edges, before giving it a silver tip.

I was very happy with the end result. So happy, I decided to try something I don’t normally attempt and give her eyes.

In the end, I am extremely proud of my job on this one. It was a nice change to take my time on a model, rather than just slap on a simple base coat and cover it with a wash.

Just finished painting Lobelia. I’m very happy with the outcome and wanted to show it off.

I will be putting up a proper step-by-step guide later, but it’s getting late in the evening now so it can wait for another day.

Since I’ve been hit hard by jet lag I decided to get a bit of painting done. Just added a quick base coat to some of my archers, which leaves me with only the axe wielding hobbits left to add colour to.