Meriadoc Brandybuck: Fictional Dioramas & Functional Usage

File this miniature under the 'better late than never' category.  I started this particular Meriadoc Brandybuck mini well over a year ago for a Hobbit Day diorama I was working on at the time.  Hobbit Day 2012 came and went with only Bilbo Baggins complete, so I abandoned Merry and onto the queue shelf he went.  Months later, I picked him up again with the goal of finishing the now near mythical diorama for Hobbit Day 2013.  That day too came and went without a completed miniature. Back on the shelf he went.  Finally, I was able to finish him last week.  Maybe, just maybe, Hobbit Day 2014 will see a completed diorama.

The planned diorama was to depict Merry spying on Bilbo in the Shire.  In The Fellowship of the Ring, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins approaches Bilbo from a distance.  Not wanting to deal with her antics, Bilbo quietly slips on his magical ring and disappears until Lobelia has safely passed him by.  Bilbo then reappears and goes about his day, oblivious to the extra company hidden beside the road.  According to the text, this event was the downfall of Bilbo's well-kept secret and a catalyst to forming the 'conspiracy' that was finally unmasked years later when Frodo tries to leave Crickhollow without his friends.

When completed (if that ever happens), Lobelia will be positioned near the bottom of a small rise continuing her walk down the lane towards Hobbiton.  Bilbo will be positioned in the lane some distance behind her, holding his trusty ring in the palm of his hand with an obviously pleased look upon his face for having avoided the dreadful creature.  Merry will be off the side of the road hidden amongst the brush and grass, not quite believing what he just witnessed.  If done correctly, I think the diorama will depict the scene from the book quite faithfully.

This version of Merry (from the Merry and Pippin vs. Grishnákh blister) is the perfect mini for the job.  He is already kneeling/hiding so no conversion was necessary.  More importantly, the look upon his face, while originally sculpted to show fear of Grishnákh, seems to show surprise as well....perfect for my project!

I'm a firm believer of double-duty miniatures.  As such, I did not want to paint and base Merry solely on the description of the Shire encounter.  I also wanted to be able to use the model for additional encounters.  I painted Merry in his Fellowship attire, including the Lothlorien cloak.  The look was flexible though.  To me, the color scheme could just as easily fit the well-tended fields of The Shire (for the diorama) as well as the wilds of Middle-earth (for gaming in general).  The main alternate use of the mini would be for its intended purpose.  The encounter that the blister was meant to depict occurred in Rohan near the eves of Fangorn Forest.  It was easy to adopt the imagery Peter Jackson used for Rohan in the movies and tie it in with The Shire with just a little stretch of the imagination.  The base could be cultivated winter wheat or natural grassland, both of which work for either use.  Now, instead of just sitting in a diorama, I can pull him out and use Merry on the game table.

There is one part of the  model that would preclude Merry from being in Rohan (as depicted in the book and movie) but it takes a sharp eye to find it.  I'll leave that one detail open to guesses in the comments section.

Though the time frame of completion may indicate otherwise, I actually enjoyed painting this miniature.  This sculpt predates GW Finecast and represents the good ole' days when GW LotR SBG products were worth the money.  The lines are clean and the details crisp.   If I remember correctly, I had very little prepping to complet before priming and painting.  That's never the case with Finecast miniatures.  Though I have plenty of GW LotR lead still to paint, working on this miniature made me miss the days when I eagerly awaited the next issue of White Dwarf to see what LotR goodies were coming out the following month.

Ending Note:  I apologize for the photos.  I tried a new lens on my camera for this session.  While the lens does a great job in other areas, close-up photography is not one of them.  The photos look very fuzzy and not at all sharp.  I could have retaken the photos but I was feeling much too lazy, just like a fat hobbit!

Don't forget to provide your guesses below.  I wonder how long it will take to spot it.  As always, thanks for reading!

Bombur

I'm still officially on a break from my Thorin & Co. project.  But when I sat down at the desk the other night to finish my previous miniature, I realized that Bombur was nearly complete.  All I needed to do was add a few highlights to move him out of the painting queue.  So I made an exception to my forced hiatus from those pesky Tolkien dwarves and polished off the big guy.

Bombur had zero lines in the theatrical release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (perhaps that will change with the upcoming extended edition).  It seems like all he did was eat.  Just like the lines on that jolly dwarve's script, my screen is pretty much blank when it comes to talking about the miniature.  It's a fine sculpt, for sure, and GW did a good job rendering the likeness of Bombur onto the mini, but that's all I got.  There's simply nothing special about Bombur or my paint job.  So instead of my usual running commentary, I'll just end here and leave visitors with a few more photos. 

I need some inspiration to finish off the last four dwarves.  Any ideas to get my dwarven groove going?

As always though, thanks for reading!!!

Dwalin the Dwarf

Another week, another dwarf.  Though I said I was going to take a break from the Thorin & Company project for a while, I was still able to complete yet another member and take one more step to finally putting the dwarves behind me.

I'm still in my little slump so just as with Dori, I will refrain from the painting cometary. There is not much to say about him beyond the fact that of the dwarves included in the set, Dwalin is one of my favorite sculpts.

Hopefully with the break I intend to take from Thorin & Company, I'll get some of my enthusiasm back for The Hobbit miniatures.  If not, I have tons of other painting projects to keep me busy for decades.

My apologies for the sluggishness of the posts and indifference to the material.

As always, thanks for reading.....

Ori the dwarf

Due to the lack of posts lately, it may look like my Thorin & Company project has come to a standstill, but that is not the case.  I've just been too lazy to post anything.  I'm actually almost done (finally) and simply need to catch up with my photography and posts to polish off Thorin and the boys.  To further that goal, here is Ori the dwarf.

Once I finally decided on an appropriate color, Ori was fairly easy to paint.  His garb is simple and he does not carry all that much equipment.  But deciding on a color was not fun.  Trying to match the tunic as it appears in the movie photography took several tries.  The color seemed to be halfway between red and purple.  Simple right?  Just mix the two and there ya go.  Not so fast there cowboy. 

No matter how I changed the ratios, I kept coming up with a very brownish burgundy.  I now think I should have tried to add a bit of blue to "cool" off the color a bit but I didn't think of it at the time.  Instead I gave up and searched the internet for a premixed color that matched what I was looking for. 

As most of you know, ordering paint online by looking at a color swatch can be an exercise in frustration.  It seems that the paint bottle in question rarely matches the color shown online.  I know that I have certainly been disappointed in the past when an order arrived only to be the wrong color.  Fortunately, that was not the case this time.  I ordered Burgundy Wine (09025) from Reaper and the match was nearly perfect for what I wanted.  I used the color as is for the basecoat then added reds and purples to create highlights and shades.  I could have lightened up the overall pallet just a bit to brighten the miniature but for the most part, I'm quite happy with the final colors.

 

Ori did not get much attention in the movie.  One of the only lines that comes to mind is during the meeting at Bag End when bravado (or perhaps the ale from Bilbo's stock) gets the best of him and causes him to blurt out "I'm not afraid!  I'm up for it.  I'll give him a taste of the Dwarvish iron right up his jacksy." I got quite a chuckle from that line!

Despite his lack of attention from Peter Jackson, he certainly garnered quite a bit from me during his time in the painting queue.  I'm glad he is done!

 

I'm feeling rather lazy again so that's all for now.  Thanks for reading......

Oin

Here's yet another member of Thorin & Company.....Oin, son of Groin.  Thorin's companions continue to grow and I can actually see light at the end of this long painting tunnel.  The signs and portents speak of a completed project in the not too distant future.

In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Oin doesn't get much on-screen time.  While he does have more lines than Bombur (it's not a difficult task considering that Bombur does not even speak the entire movie), he does not have much to say beyond telling the company about the portents that suggest Smaug might be dead or ready to be killed.  "Ravens have been seen flying back to the mountain as it was foretold: When the birds of yore return to Erebor, the reign of the beast will end." Since I painted Oin completely in browns ( and a little grey), I really don't have much to say either.  He was a fun mini to paint but the color palette was not all that exciting, leaving me with little to comment on.

I am excited about the sculpt however. The details were crisp and prominent and the stance was pleasing to the eye.  In addition, I like that he, along with Kili, has his hood on.  It's not a big deal, but the hoods were an important part for me growing up reading the book.  I remembered the color of the hoods before I got the names of the dwarves right back in those days.  I think it's a proper acknowledgement to the Professor that Peter Jackson, and GW in return, kept that part of the book somewhat accurate.

Oin can now stand beside his brother Gloin in the display case.  Then one day, after the dwarves are finished and I power through all those goblins in the Escape from Goblin Town box set, I can finally sit down to a proper wargame with the miniatures.

Thanks for reading.....

Gloin - Baby Daddy of Gimli

I'm still working on those darn dwarves.  Will the insanity never end?  As I continue to paint, I'm also in the process of photographing and posting the completed furry-faced fellas.  Today I offer Gloin, son of Groin, and the father of John Rhys-Davies (also known as Gimli).

I have mentioned before that, with the exception of Fili (which is an absolutely horrible model), GW did a wonderful job on the miniatures in the Escape from Goblin Town set.  Gloin is a well-detailed mini with an exceptionally pleasing dynamic pose.  With legs spread and arms poised for battle, one can almost sense the kinetic energy built up in the sculpt.  Gloin is definitely one of my favorites in the set.

 

Painting was fairly straightforward and mostly agreeable to the GW scheme.  His armor was basecoated with Dark Flesh.  Scorched brown was then mixed in to provide shadows while several flavors of red were added for highlighting.  The armor looked pretty good but it needed something else.  So I looked at photographs and searched the web for inspiration.  My efforts brought me back to the source however.  I was very much impressed with the freehand work on the Gloin miniature by the GW painters in the December 2012 issue of White Dwarf.  So I attempted to add a bit myself by adding a dwarven themed cross pattern on the armor after the highlight phase.  I used a watered-down darkened brown (Walnut Brown from Reaper if I remember correctly) to allow the paint to flow freely from the brush during the freehand.  For the most part the technique worked.  Though it's tough to see in the photographs due to my washed-out pics, it's much easier to discern in person.  I was thinking of going darker but then I would be worried that the effect would be too harsh and not appear to be part of the leather.  What do you think?

The under-tunic was painted with Reaper reds.  Deep Red (09002), Blood Red (09003), and Fire Red (09004) resulted in a deep rich red hue that suggests a fairly nice item of clothing.  Though the movie makes much of the fact that the dwarves were without a home, it must be remembered that according to the books, the dwarves abiding with Thorin before the Quest of Erebor did rather well for themselves and would have had access to above average garb.  Just as the under-tunic needed to look warm and vibrant, I tried to do the same for the trousers.  I basically started with Highland Moss (09083) and fudged the color up and down for the shadows and highlights to suggest a material of higher quality.

 

The rest of the miniature was pretty standard stuff....leather trim, boots, and metallics were all completed using basic colors.

So Gimli's father is now complete and can join Thorin and Bilbo on their trek over the edge of the wild.  Hopefully the rest of the company will join them ere the break of day 2014.

Thanks for reading......

Thorin Oakenshield - The Leader of the Company

As promised, I'm starting to post individual photographs of the dwarves I've been able to complete thus far in the Thorin & Company project.  Here we have Thorin Oakenshield, son of Thrain.

Those that read this blog know that I'm not a big fan of plastic.  Metal is the way to go for me.  However, as far as plastic goes, Thorin is a good sculpt.  The detail is more than acceptable for this particular medium.  The details are crisp except for in a few spots: the armor on the shoulders is rather lacking and the area around the bracers and hands is devoid of much relief.  Otherwise, I think Thorin is rather well done.  I hate Finecast almost as much as plastic but I'll be interested to see how detailed the resin version will be.  Alas for the loss of metal....

I'll not go into much detail on the paint job since the color scheme is rather straightforward.  I used Reaper paints throughout, which mostly matched up well with the suggested GW paints.  I did choose a slightly different blue to better match the color of Thorin's tunic in the movie photography however.

 I have been torn on the subject of basing Thorin & Company.  I almost went with a stony "Mines of Moria" base to better reflect the company's time in Goblin Town.  However, the battle scenarios listed in the Goblin Town set will become stale after several games and I thought the miniatures would be more flexible with standard "outdoorsy" bases.  I'll need to surf the web a bit to see what others are doing with their bases.

Anyhow, the figure completion count continues to rise for Thorin & Company.  I'll try to get Gloin posted a bit later this week.

Thanks for reading.....

Thorin & Company Update #4

Yep....still working on those darn dwarves.  Hopefully this will be the last update before completion. 

As of the end of January, these are the members of the company that have been completed:  Bilbo, Thorin, Gloin, Nori, Ori, and Oin.  I posted close-ups of Bilbo last week and will try to get the rest of the boys on the blog soon.  The photos are already taken.  I just need to find time to sit down and post them.  Easier said than done these days.....

The next batch are the members of the company that are nearly complete.  In fact, I finished Balin last night.  Dwalin, Bombur, and Kili need some additional highlighted then they should be good to go.

Finally, Dori, Bofur, Fili, and Bifur are the minis that need the most work.  Well, that's not exactly true,  Right after I took these photos with my phone the other night I finally figured out a color scheme on Dori that I was happy with and ended up completing him in that sitting.  I photographed him with the good camera last night (along with Balin) and will post the completed close-ups of them soon.  But the others do need considerable attention...especially Fili and Bifur.  I have done very little work with the latter just because he always seems to be at the end of the assembly line.  As for the former, if you've read the other updates, then you probably remember why Fili has seen so little attention.  I hate strongly dislike the sculpt so it's hard to get excited about working on him.

So there it is.  The second to the last update.  I wonder if anyone else is taking this long to finish their dwarves?

Thanks for reading.....

Bilbo Baggins - A Baggins of Bag End

I should have titled this post:  A Long Expected Update.  I've been pretty quiet online lately.  For whatever reason, this is only my second post of the month (and just barely at that).  While many of my favorite bloggers try to post several times a week, that's way too much for me personally.  I don't have the time, and even if I did, I don't think I'd have enough to say to fill the blank screen.  I do try to post at least once a week however, but even that has been difficult this month.

Anyhow, here's a quick one to bring up my average for January.  Since picking up the Escape from Goblin Town set in December, I've been mostly working on Bilbo and the dwarves.  If you've been following my Thorin & Company updates, you can see that the miniatures are coming along at a glacial pace.  I have finished almost half but I have yet to publish any close-up photos of the completed minis.  I'll remedy that with this post by presenting the miniature I first completed.

For the most part, I followed the general GW color scheme on Bilbo Baggins but chose to use Reaper paints instead.  For the jacket, I first started with an undercoat of Clotted Red (09134).  This is always my first step when painting reds over black primer.  I've found that Clotted Red brings out the vibrancy of the regular reds used in the main palette while reducing the number of coats needed overall.  Next I applied Carnage Red (09135) as the basecoat then blended up and down to add the highlights and shadows.  In the movie, the coat is rather dark and I wanted to avoid bringing the reds too high in the spectrum and appearing orange-ish (is that even a word?).  By adding very small amounts of brown I was able to keep the coat somewhat subdued.

For the trousers, I did use GW's Scorched Brown as the basecoat.  I then added a bit of Reaper Intense Brown (09138) to the mix for the highlights and used Blackened Brown (09137) for the shadows.  Doing so resulted in a nice soft brown color that suggests a finer weave of cloth for the well-to-do Mr. Baggins.

The vest was basecoated with Reaper's Highland Moss (09083) and simply mixed with other components from their triad system for the next stages.  The colors don't always work well together with their triads, but when they do, mixing paints is greatly simplified.

 

After undercoating with a mid-level brown, I finished up with a coat of Chestnut Gold (09073) on the scarf.  Several coats of brown wash followed by additional applications of Chestnut Gold resulted in a deep, richly colored scarf.  I was going to apply a bit of freehand on the scarf to add some detail to an otherwise plain sculpt, but if I remember correctly, at the time, Christmas was rapidly approaching and I had tons of other real life projects to do.

So that's it for now.  I'll try to post the close-ups of Thorin, Gloin, Oin,Ori, and Dori in the next week or so as well as another Thorin & Company update.  Hopefully I'll have this project wrapped up soon so that I can move on to other things.

Thanks for reading.....

Thorin & Company Update #1

Since I received my Hobbit starter set last week, I've been working here and there on Mr. Baggins and his dwarven companions.  So that I have them all ready at the same time to run a few scenarios from the game, I'm treating them as a batch painting project.  Though the process will not go as quickly as if painting an army with the same color schemes, I think I'll still be able to progress a bit quicker by painting similar parts and colors at the same time rather than treating each figure as an individual project.  We'll see how the plan works.

So this is where I am right now.  I've cleaned, filed, and assembled all of the "good" models from the set.  I added basing material then primed the group black with a spray since the humidity has finally fallen enough here on the island to give me a break from having to use brush on primer (Guesso).  After everything was dry, I added a deep basecoat of Reaper Intense Brown (09138) to reduce the number of flesh coats I needed to apply over black primer.  I also used what was left over of the brown to do a bit of drybrusing on a few of the bases.

 All of the eyes were then painted.  I generally start by painting the entire eye socket black to help bolster the impression of depth around the eyes.  I then fill in the majority of the eye with an off white for the sclera (the white of the eye), leaving a thin outline of black applied in the previous step.  The eyes are completed by painting the iris black using the "stripe" technique.  A friend has provided an excellent tutorial on his blog on how to paint this stripe if you're not familiar with the process.

Finally, most of the models received a coat of Reaper Tanned Shadow (09043) as the initial flesh tone.  Despite the coat of Intense Brown, I'll need to apply another coat of flesh before I begin the real process of painting faces and other flesh parts.  Then it's on to apply base colors to the garb.  This is where I hope to save lots of time since for the most part, the color palette of the dwarves seems to be fairly uniform.  I should be able to slap on paint with minimal mixing between figures and hopefully bring them to the gaming table within a week or so.

More updates to come......

From The Ashes A Fire Shall Be Woken???

I've been thinking lately about letting my White Dwarf subscription run out.  It's expensive, full of GW propaganda, and in my humble opinion, is mostly a monthly company catalog.  I no longer play WFB or 40K (although I still collect some of the models) so what little useable text within the pages there is, it's rather useless to me.  Even the well-painted models are less of an attraction these days.  The painting is still absolutely gorgeous but for the most part, the models themselves are getting ridiculous.  What's all this crap sticking out of them lately?  How do these guys walk around, much less fight?  To be completely honest, it was only the Lord of the Rings content that kept me hanging on, and even that has been pretty much nonexistent for some time now.

My August copy of White Dwarf arrived today (it takes forever for it to make it down here) and any thought of letting my subscription lapse suddenly vanished like a certain Hobbit placing a magical ring on his finger.  It seems after a long absence (beyond just fluff articles), LotR SBG content is coming back!

My heart raced as I glanced lovingly at the two page spread graced by Bilbo, Gandalf, and Thorin and company.  Sudden memories of the glory days of LotR rushed through my brain and the long defeat seemed to be coming to an end.  Indeed, hope did remain while the company was true...

Of course I knew, or strongly suspected, that GW would cash in on The Hobbit money making machine.  I was pretty sure we would see new models and possibly a revamped game.  But I didn't begin to think that this one photo, this little tease of things to come, would reignite so strongly the feelings of those blissful early days of the game and the LotR films.  I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl right now and cannot wait for the upcoming monthly content in White Dwarf, the pending miniature releases, and the general resurgence (hopefully) of a game I dearly love.

For those of us lonely collectors and gamers that never gave up on the forlorn system, now is our time to rejoice.  Though GW may try to weave a spell and force me to purchase Finecast models, at least there is now light for the world of men and LotR gamers.  As Hurin once yelled long ago in the years of the First Age, "Aure enteluva! Day shall come again."  And so it shall be for us....collectors, players, and lovers of this game.

I'll be waiting with bated breath for the upcoming issues.  No chance of me cancelling my subscription now. Who knows what treasures lie within the golden horde that GW has slept upon for these long years.....

Damn you GW, you had me at "In a hole in the ground...."






If you are not a subscriber and cannot read the text in the ad, here is what it says...

Unless you have been hiding in a Hobbit-hole, you'll know the epic movie, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, reaches cinemas in December.  We are tremendously excited about the forthcoming tabletop battle game and range of new miniatures based on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and the opportunity to continue the exploration of Middle-earth that began with The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.

Keep up to date with all the movie news and trailers at the-hobbit-movie.com, and find out all about Games Workshop's new releases in the months to come in the pages of White Dwarf and the Games Workshop website, games-workshop.com.