Orcs marching out

I like the feeling I have after completing a batch of minis. It's always nice to see a solid amount painted up and completed with themed bases. Today I finished painting the Black Guard of Barad Dur. These minis are not too demanding as far as painting is concerned but still I took me a few evenings to finish them off. I chose the 'official' GW colour scheme as I kind of liked it. However, I went for slightly darker tones so that the eye symbol on the shields would stand in contrast with the armour.

Anyway, here they are, together with a movement tray.



A close-up on the command group.


And the whole group.


Next up are more minis from Lotr SBG. To give you a preview of what I'll be working on, know that this time I will be going west ;)

Elven Valour

First of the announced projects is finished. A party of High Elves for my Elven Kingdoms, my Wotr army is slowly growing in size. No fireworks here I know, but to be honest they started to annoy me while painting.

Simple bases finish their woodland look. I used some flock and shrubs from Spectre Hobbies set and I'm still thinking about adding some static grass but I'm worried it might be a slight overkill.

Now time to take care of those Galadhrim Knights before another commission with Morgul Knights arrives ;)

Ugly Guard of Barad-Dur

Time to get some commissions done. Right now I'm going to work on 12 Black Guard of Barad Dur. I was very disappointed when I saw them for the first time on the Advance orders list and now I dislike them even more. I would imagine them as bigger and more powerful than normal orcs. And bigger they are, but also clumsy and misshapen. It looks like the sculptor was in a rush and forgot about adding details to these minis.The only thing that in my opinion doesn't look bad are the shields. The have two main advantages. First of all, they are well sculpted (the eye thing is a nice touch). And secondly, once glued, they cover most of the model.

As always when working with metal minis, I started by removing the mold lines and metal tags, remaining from the forging process (awful lot of them). The bases are also prepared, so all that is left is giving them some solid coat of black. I prefer the Army Painter black primer as it seems to have the perfect consistency and flows well into recesses. But that's the next step, here's how they look like at the moment.



I'm not very enthusiastic about painting these minis but I'm going to use the official colour scheme (mostly dark metallics and black/grey with green skin) so I should be able to finish them quickly. You don't always get to choose what you paint for commissions but I'm not complaining as it pays quite well.

All right, that's it for today. Make sure to check out in a couple of days, pics of painted orcs should be here.

Warfare in Production

Time for me to follow Viruk's first post here and iniciate my set of blog appearances on the IP blog. I'll skip the foreword since, both Viruk and top of the site, spoke my mind.

As some of you might have noticed, the title is a variation of the acronym WiP, which stands for Work In Progress. That will for sure give the spirit and main idea of set of photos I prepared for you today.

For the last 3 weeks I've been mainly involved in some commission painting for people who, mainly, will attend Mitril Wars in April. In the meantime I managed to save some ime for my own projects.

The first one is a party of High Elves Warriors (mix of swordsman and archers) which I dug out from my backlog box. For those of you who are shocked by the colour scheme: I intend them to be a part of my WotR Elven Kingdoms army, and since my Wood Elves main colour is green and it's various variations, I decided to paint HE accordingly, hence the green scheme.

Next project is a formation of Galadhrim Knights. I intend to finish them by the end of March (yeah your're right it gives me about 7 days). Also one more thing about that one is that I was obliged to write some painting guide on Mitril and I decided that painting GK will be one worth writing.

You may notice some fine basing detalils from Spactre Hobbies set I won in One-Ring's Awards last year.

That's it for now. I'll do my best to post some update on both projects in couple of days ;)

P.S: Just like Viruk I'd like to Stan for this banner he made for us - true definition of awesomeness ;)

Let there be dwarves

Hi everyone,

I've been toying with the idea of starting a hobby blog for a while now. Finally, together with a buddy of mine we decided to set up one in which we'll present our works and share some thoughts on issues related to the hobby.
So what you can you expect to see here? Different minis, different painting styles, and of course different opinions.

I'm usually busy with painting commissions for other people, mostly for the Lord of the Rings SBG. From time to time I also buy minis that I like only to paint them and put them on ebay. Sometimes I also paint my own stuff. Personally I find it difficult to find the motivation for doing it. I'm not a gamer so I'm not pressured by tournament requirements of having the army painted. And even more importantly - I'm not getting paid for that. These are the main reasons why most of my dwarf army has remained unpainted for a few years. However, I've recently made a resolution to paint at least several minis for my army per month. So far I've been fairly successful and here's what I've got.


8 Warriors with hand weapon and shield


A command with a few more warriors armed with two-handed axes. I'm not a big fan of NMM. I guess one needs to have very high painting skills to get it looking really good. I generally prefer true metallics. Here I made an exception and used gold NMM for the eagle on the banner. The shape of this bird is sculpted on the banner, which makes painting it much easier than creating your own freehand.

And now, some elite units. I chose some special resin bases that look like old ruins as I want them to stand out among the crowd, and that is not easy if you're a dwarf ;)


8 Khazad Guard


Iron Guard


4 Vault Warden Team units. I put some runic inscriptions on the shields, good luck deciphering them ;) I also converted one of them, just to add some variety.

So that's what I have now. When painting an army it's important to find the right balance between quality and quantity. I wanted to get a solid Table Top level for my dwarves, which meant that I wasn't going to pay that much attention to details. I basically speed-painted them, working on groups of 8-16 minis at a time.
Finding the colour scheme was one of the main challenges. I've started with the 'traditional' green but wasn't happy with how it turned out and decided to go with the purple-silver/gold look. I like the way purple looks next to bright silver shade or gold one. As you can see, most of the minis presented here have silver armour. I plan to have half of the army painted in this scheme and the other half with gold, keeping the clothes purple so that they'll look like an army, not a random selection of warriors. Also, bearing in mind the fact that the War of the Ring is becoming increasingly popular, I want to have them in eights, i.e. eight warriors with silver armour and the same type with golden.
I think that overall they do not look bad and will look nice on the battlefield one day.

OK, I guess that's all for my first entry. I'll try to make an update soon. Until then, happy painting :)

Cheers

p.s. three big cheers for Stan - a friend of mine who created the wonderful banner you can see at the top :)