Thorin & Company Update #2

Christmas parties and social engagements have kept me from spending as much time as I would like at the painting desk, but I have been able to work on my Thorin and Co. project a bit between events.

As you can see from the photo (my apologies again....I didn't feel like messing with the Nikon so I snapped this with my phone), about half of the dwarves (and Bilbo) have seen some progress.  The work has been mostly about experimenting with colors to match the movie stills and applying basecoats.  Only Bilbo and Thorin have seen any shading or highlighting, and that has been minimal at best.

Since I'm "batch painting" the company, the figures with the most attention all have reds or dark browns as a base color in common.  As I mentioned in the last update, I'm trying to minimize paint mixing to speed the process along so on a whim, I started with reds and browns.  I decided to concentrate on just those colors to begin with then branch out as the color selection grows.  As I add lighter browns for highlighting, I'll then bring in miniatures like Bofur and Kili which can benefit from the new color additions.  As other colors are needed for belts, pouches, etc, then the rest of the miniatures will finally enter the queue.  Hopefully, when all is said and done, the entire process will have saved me some time.

Obviously Thorin does not fit the pattern.  He's in a league of his own...quite literally.  He is the only model that will utilize any amount of blue so I've been working on him separately.  His color palette is fairly simple so he may actually end up being the first miniature finished.

So that's it for now.  I'll not be working on Thorin & Co. tonight since I will be leaving soon to attend the midnight opening of The Hobbit.  Hopefully I'll get more ideas for the color schemes as I watch Mr. Baggins begin his unexpected journey.

And speaking of the movie, I just want to say this before the general premier.  To the naysayers on the internet that bemoan the fact that Peter Jackson is taking a rather short book and turning it into three movies only to "milk the cash cow" and is not remaining true to the book, I have to ask....have you ever read the book?  The Hobbit is a children's book....written for....wait for it....here it comes....children.  If Peter Jackson were to stay "true" to the actual book, we'd have a movie that lasts a little over an hour long and have the most silly absurd dialog possible (tra-la-la-lilly anyone?).  We'd also have a Thorin Oakenshield that looks and acts like this:

instead of this:

I'm a huge Tolkien fan (and have been for over thirty years) and dare I say, amateur Tolkien scholar, yet I'm more than OK with what Peter Jackson is doing to the book.  I own the Rankin/Bass cartoon that follows the book nearly perfectly.  I certainly do not want to see a rehashed version of that.  Now I'm ready to go see what The Hobbit may have looked like if Tolkien had written The Lord of the Rings first and fully developed his legendarium before scribbling those now famous words..... "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit".

Thanks for reading!