Blowing one's own horn

I decided to take part of my day off to do a tiddly bitmore on the beast of Gorgoroth. As I find chains the most annoyng thing to paint, I did them first, to remove the risk of frustratingly spoiling a carefully painted skin.

 

As the colour scheme for my force of Cirith Ungol is an eerie blue (Shock-horror! L.o.t.R. forces of eveil using a cold colour? Surely not!), I wanted to subtly include some blue on the beast, other than just the pieces of cloth. So I got out what will, I think, be a much used pot of Asurmen Blue wash which I liberaly applied to the first coat of grey, before doing two highlight coats. It's a very basic way of doing things, but I can no longer afford to spend quite so long paintingminis, so I opted for quick but effective solution. The infantry will simply be dipped.

 

 

Joe the Barbarian, who might actually manage to finish a model before 2013!

A beastly comeback

What ho! Having at last decided to give my self a kick up the backside and get back into the hobby, I knew that only something worthy of an announcement would suffice. What better task to undertake than to put together the Best of Gorgorth which the Frog, Shas'El'Hek'Tryk, gifted me for my birthday ("Because it's my birthday, and I wants it.") some 8 months ago.

 

We all know the inherent problems of Finecast, so I'll spare you the details. Let's just say that it didn't slot together very well. Happily, a quick answer was at hand. As any good English solution to a problem, it involved tea. It turns out that, when plunged in freshly boiled water, Finecast becomes perfectly malleable, without actually melting away any of the details. After that, all that was needed was a bit of liquid Green Stuff and Milliput to plug the last gaps.

 

Joe the Barbarian, the hardest part now is to keep on finding the time to do it. But all we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given.

I could Haradly say no!

Before returning to Old Blighty, to live in London, Shas'El'Hek'Tryk made an offer I couldn't refuse, as he finally gave in to my requests to paint the first units of his Haradrim army for him!

Armed with a test model he gave me, I set out to replicate to my best his colour scheme, keeping in mind that I don't use an all-Citadel palette, whereas he does.

Here is his test model (left) and my first attempt (right).

I was thrilled when he gave his approval and promptly went straight into the next batch of 5 lancers. Some have more detailed faces than others, owing to the position of the spears. There are no doubt some imperfections, but these are just cannon-fodder. Happily, there aren't any cannon in the Lord of the Rings.

Joe the Barbarian, a Rosbeef who's glad his Froggy nemesis will actually own a painted army.

Arise! Arise, riders of Theoden!

To celebrate landing a new job, I decided to finish these 6 riders of Rohan, which had been lying around on the painting desk for quite some time.
These minor, yet highly effective, conversions are the fruit of the Frog's labour. Shas'El'Hek'Tryk really made a good job of it.

Moving to London this week, I went to look back on my Rohirrim force as it stands, before launching fully into my next challenges: Mordor, Saxons, Normans and... painting a Haradrim company for our favourite Shas'El, who has finally granted me permission to go ahead with starting his army. It must be said, in his defence, that he has spent the past year or so trying to figure out (ha! figure... pardon the unintended pun) how to save them after an unfortunated undercoating incident which left his minis looking as if they'd just been in a sand storm. I did point out that it was rather fitting for desert dwellers.

Enough chit-chat. Here are my Rohirrim so far (minus the few archers and Theodred).

Joe the Barbarian; a Rosbeef who's heading back to live in mad-cow country.

Shopping for a troll-ey

More news from the front. Having converted and uindercoated a group of orcs, the "Shiny! Shiny! syndrome" (SSS) kicked in again and I found myself buying a Mordor troll... in an actual Games Workshop store... Yup. It's getting serious.

A quick side-note to point out that, while converting said Troll, I got SSS again and bidded for a load of LotR characters on fleaBay. But it was worth it!

Anyhoo! Back to the troll. I wanted to go for something slightly different, a nice centre-piece (mehopes) for my army. A Mordor troll? Who can forget Aragorn being crushing under foot by a troll in front of the Black Gate? I decided to adapt that to fit in my other LotR force; Rohan. So a poor Rohirrim got knocked off his horse and is struggling to keep the troll's foot from crushing him, while his dead horse lies beside him.

These are very W.i.P. shots, just to show the general idea. The fallen rider is not sculpted yet -cloak, armour, arms, hands and beard need doing- nor is the troll finished. The foot, neck, helmet, and scales are not yet finished, and the loin cloth needs doing. And, of course, all those mould joints need seeing to.

Any thoughts?

Joe the "Rosbif" Barbarian

Empirical truth

A slight aparte from our usual posts; I couldn't resist posting this link to this superb Empire army by GMM Studios.
A beautiful centre-piece, massive units and a strong colour theme; magnificent!

Check out the link; it's well worth it!

Joe the Barbarian

Getting straight to the pointy ears: 2nd LotR battle of the Ouestfolde Tourney

Battle 2: “Take & hold!”

Main objective: capture 3 fixed objectives and control them undisputedly.
Secondary objective: keep the general near the central objective.

After having psychologically blocked-out the memories of the Ouestfolde (sic) Tourney for over a month, I think it’s about time I carried on the tale of this great clash of armies.

As you’ll remember, after much frustration at not being able to get at the objective due to a corner section of wall and a particularly tenacious troll, I managed to just scrape a minor victory in the first battle by successfully getting half my army –not one man more, not one man fewer- across the enemy’s table edge. I was therefore eager to get stuck into the next battle, in order to gain extra tourney points; I had come to win.

The second battle pitched my valiant Rohirrim against the pointy-eared skirt-wearing tree-hugging eco-warriors known as the Galadhrim of Lothlorien. I hope my opponent will forgive me; so much time has past that I can’t remember anyone’s name.

Unluckily for me, the battle took place at night, so my riders would only have half their movement rate. Unluckily for him, fighting in the dark meant that his archers would only have the same range as my javelins.

Out of the night, they came!

The battlefield was littered with several large dragon bones, which made forming a single battle line impossible. I split my force into 3 divisions; the first, led by the King, would go straight up the centre and secure the objective in the middle of the battlefield. The second would take the objective on my right, anchoring its flank against a massive dragon’s skull. The third, my cavalry and a couple of javelins, would go around the skull and take the enemy in the rear. The elves would thus be caught up in a firmly established killing ground (area marked in black on the first image), between the King’s men, the captain’s unit and the flanking cavalry to the rear. Once I had dealt with his main body of men, I would then send a few warriors to capture the final objective.My adversary had a large mass of dragon bones on his left, which meant that his only way of sending a large squad to hold the objective on my left would mean putting them way out of his right, away from all the fighting. He therefore decided to concentrate all his forces in one area, mirroring to some extent my own deployment. I was feeling pretty confident; all those points he’d spent on bows for those expert elf archers would be pretty much useless, whereas my javelins would still have all their potential. On top of that, during a test game 3 days earlier, my Rohirrim had completely trounced the Frog (Shas’El’Hek’Tryk) using Limey’s elves, so I knew that my warriors could hold their own against elves.

Take out their archers and meet me in the middle!

I sent my men forwards and they duly took up their positions. Of course, the objectives being equidistant between my lines and the enemy’s, we both got to the central objective at the same time. I just managed to get to the objective on my right slightly ahead of my opponent, but his troops were so close that that objective was obviously being contested. He sent 2 men to the objective on my left. I had plenty of time and decided to deal with them later, want wanted to spread the fighting to a third place, as that would dilute the effect of my killing ground.
The elven archers stayed slightly behind, either to serve as a tactical reserve or to deal with my cavalry. Unfortunately for them, it was my cavalry which dealt with them, taking them out relatively easily, before falling on the rear of his army, as planned.

Despite my javelins in the centre managing to disrupt his lines quite effectively, the rest of my warriors were simply failing to make any real impact. The fight was set to last quite a while yet.

And then came the shout I least wanted to hear…”Last turn!”

What??? The organisers, naturally having to juggle with the lunch break, decided to cut the battle short, by at least half an hour.

Result of the battle: the central and right objectives were being contested. I hadn’t had time to get a detachment over to deal with the 2 elves at the objective on my left. Both generals had stayed in the centre, so my adversary won 1-0.

That’ll teach me to deal with all objectives right away. Time is a variable which could have gone either way.

Primary objective Rohan: 0 objectives. Elves: 1 objective.
Secondary objective Rohan: success. Elves: success.
RESULT: Minor victory for the Elves