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Author Topic: Tolkien Orc Kitbash p.24 - Second batch of Uruk-Hai, and more trolls painted.  (Read 54514 times)

Offline joe5mc

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #180 on: January 08, 2021, 06:53:25 PM »
Gorgeous!

Offline Captain Blood

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #181 on: January 08, 2021, 06:55:13 PM »
Thank you Joe :)

Yes, there’s a Mantic ghoul head in there. That free sprue from Salute finally came in useful  lol
I’ve used the second Mantic head on one of the orc archers - coming soon!
The other two nasty looking heads on the Uruks are from the excellent Frostgrave Cultists set, a super versatile resource.

Excellent...because you can’t really have a couple of dozen orcs it would look odd.

Couple of thousand...much more sensible  ;)

lol Ah, Matt, I am not going to get into a kitbashing arms race with you, my friend. You are waaaaay too prolific lol

Offline Ultravanillasmurf

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #182 on: January 09, 2021, 01:24:17 PM »
They are very good.
That free sprue from Salute finally came in useful  lol
That explains why I have one more sprue than I was expecting...

Offline Captain Blood

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #183 on: January 09, 2021, 03:01:46 PM »
Yes, I think it was in the goody bag five or six years ago  lol

Offline gamer Mac

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #184 on: January 09, 2021, 05:00:52 PM »
Stunning work :-* :-* :-* :-* :-* :-*

Offline jamesmanto

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #185 on: January 11, 2021, 12:35:56 AM »
wow!!
those are quite splendid

Offline Craig Oxbrow

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #186 on: January 12, 2021, 10:25:28 PM »
They came together seamlessly as a group of varied 'realistic' Orcs. Lovely work.

Offline Elbows

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #187 on: January 12, 2021, 11:53:51 PM »
Very nice, as usual!
2024 Painted Miniatures: 166
('23: 159, '22: 214, '21: 148, '20: 207, '19: 123, '18: 98, '17: 226, '16: 233, '15: 32, '14: 116)

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Offline Captain Blood

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #188 on: January 13, 2021, 09:41:51 AM »
Thanks  :)

Orc painting has been interrupted by frenzied kitbashing of Haradrim and their pachyderms! Pics soon, all being well...

Offline Cubs

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #189 on: January 13, 2021, 10:08:44 AM »
Supoib collection of Orcsies.
'Sir John ejaculated explosively, sitting up in his chair.' ... 'The Black Gang'.

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Offline Hammers

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #190 on: January 13, 2021, 11:29:03 AM »
I can't remember if I have chimed in with the others yet, Richard. I seem to be gushing praise endlessly at your creation so I fear I may devalue my posts.

Anyway, to be a bit more nuanced in my laudations: those orcs are bot innovative and old school at the same time. I have myself recently painted about a hundred uruk-hai of the Games Workshop/Weta/Peter Jackson type, and while they are certainly not shit, they not close to the vision I once had of how orcs of various breeds should look.  Yours come much closer to the Angus McBride/Hildebrand i pictured in my mind back when I was... 10?
 
I  thikn you are on the right track with arms and armor to. The PJ orcs, armed by WETA, look too much like inefficient and flimsy scrap metal, which is a clear deviation from the descriptions in the books.

Offline Captain Blood

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.12 painted orc company complete)
« Reply #191 on: January 15, 2021, 06:27:00 PM »
lol Gush away, Peder - I can take it ;)

I’ve been temporarily diverted from my orcses by a strange urge to extend my Tolkien kitbashing to other races, starting with the Haradrim.

The Haradrim are men in the service of the Dark Lord, Sauron - basically stereotypical rascally Middle Eastern types (although they come from the south, ‘Southrons’, rather than the east). There are ‘Easterlings’ as well, in Tolkien’s landscape of races and cultures, but none of these bit-part races are well described in the books. In fact, apart from hobbits and elves, none of Tolkien’s races are that well described in his writings. He’s much more interested in their languages, literature, and genealogies, than important things like their clothes, armour, weapons, customs, etc. All this is sketchily described for the most part.

In the case of the Haradrim, all he really tells us is that they’re brave fighters - tall, dark-skinned, with braided black hair and dark eyes. They wear scarlet and black with golden ornaments, including (shock, horror!) earrings. Corsets of overlapping brazen plates and scimitars get a mention. Shields are round, yellow with black designs.  One of their chieftains has a black serpent motif on his scarlet banners. They have war elephants called Mûmakil (‘oliphaunts’ to the hobbits) also bedecked in scarlet and gold trappings, with fighting towers on their backs for spearmen and bowmen. And… that’s about it.

Based on this, I’ve gone for a more or less ‘Arabian Nights’ look :)

I used parts from around 20 different plastic kits to make up this small force…

Forgive me while I bore you with some of the details. (For those who don’t like reading lots of words, just enjoy the pictures ;))

These first three Haradrim all have heads from the Fireforge Russian Infantry set. The heads, sporting a variety of Eastern spiky helmet styles, are perfect for this pseudo-Eastern melange.



The Russian bodies aren’t bad – lamellar armour or mail. Except that they have really badly sculpted swords moulded-onto their sides. Why? Most of the other FF sets have separate swords in scabbards, which is a much better idea. (I couldn’t be bothered to cut them off and make good, so I’ve just left them where I’ve used these bodies. Mostly they’ll be covered by shields anyway). The Russian arms are also a mixed bag – very crabbed looking, and some with open hands. Not great. But the heads alone are worth the price of entry.

For kitbashers who care:
- The L/hand figure is one of the FF Russian bodies with a pair of Perry HYW French knight’s arm with axe.
- The middle figure has a Gripping Beast Arab Infantry body (the bodies aren’t too bad if you’re just after plain robes – but IMHO the heads are Godawful: comical cartoon bazaar characters). Arms and mace from the FF Russian set.
- R/hand figure is a FF Foot Serjeants body with Frostgrave cultist arms.

The next three figures (below) also have heads from the FF Russian set, but to these I’ve added Green Stuff puggarees, and puggaree tails from the Perry Afghan set. 



- The L/hand figure has a FF Russian body with Perry HYW French arms and a Perry Afghan shield.
- The middle figure is another GB Arab body, and the R/hand figure a FF Byzantine spearman body.

I think the Byzantine set was the first Fireforge set where they changed to digital sculpting, and it shows.
I’d hoped to use some of the Byzantine heads (slightly pointy, near eastern-looking helmets with lamellar aventails) but unfortunately the heads in this Byzantine set are weirdly deformed - way too long, front to back - so I decided against. Pity. The Byzantine bodies however, are very nice.
The two figures on the right both use arms from the Frostgrave Knights set. The shield on the centre figure is from the FF Steppe Warriors set. The r/hand figure has a Wargames Atlantic Irish shield.

Now I confess I’ve been a bit sniffy about one or two of the early Wargames Atlantic offerings, but I freely recant as far as this Dark Age Irish set goes, because it's very nice indeed. It has only six different bodies (boo!) but a cornucopia of lovely shields in different shapes and sizes, plus a lot of attractive arm, weapon and head options. It’s also very sharply moulded.



The next three (above) all have Perry Afghan heads. L-to-R:
- FF Byzantine body (excellent crisp detail, which seems to be common to all the digitally sculpted plastic sets), Victrix Saxon shield, FF Foot Serjeant arms.
- FF Foot Serjeants body, GB Arab shield, Perry HYW French arms and falchion (scimitar)
- Frostgrave Cultist body, Perry WOTR infantry arms with another HYW falchion swapped onto the end of the right arm. Wargames Atlantic Irish buckler. Plus Green Stuff dreads…



The last three, above, L-to-R:
- FF Russian body, GB veiled Arab head (there are a couple of these veiled heads on each GB Arab frame, and they’re the only worthwhile heads in the set IMHO), Perry Afghan arms, Oathmark goblin shield.
- GB Arab body, Perry Ansar head, Perry Afghan arms and drum.
- FF Russian body, Frostgrave soldier arms, a very nice big convex shield from the FF Russian set, and the head… not sure. Might be GW from the bits box?  Looks suitably Turkic, in any event.

Here they are all together…



And from behind…



The paint scheme will do the heavy lifting to tie together all these many and various elements into a cohesive looking company of fierce Haradrim.

Onto the pachyderms…



These are the Victrix African War elephants.
This is a great kit, although apart from the mahouts, a couple of javelin arms, and one set of pike arms, I haven’t used any of the 16 beautiful crew figures that come with the set (providing Roman, Carthaginian, Ptolemaic and Numidian options – none of which are any good to me for this project, nice as they are).



The mahouts have been doctored with new heads and shields.



The fighting crews are kitbashed like the infantry, from similar sources. There are a couple of other kits involved here though, including a Frostgrave Barbarian head, a heavily doctored FF Templar knight head, and a GB Saxon thegn body!



The elephants themselves are straight builds from the kit – you can make slightly different versions depending on which halves you pair, and which trunk you add.



I have however added a shitload of random stowage from the bits box to the howdahs, treating them in much the same way as my WW2 AFVs lol



Here’s a stowage option I felt I had to just try out :D



And here’s the whole rascally gang together.



It will be a while before this little lot gets painted, as I have a lot more orcs to finish first - amongst many other things ::)

I also have trolls and warg riders underway… Watch this space!

Offline Dr Mathias

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.13 the Haradrim - plus Mumakil!)
« Reply #192 on: January 15, 2021, 06:33:40 PM »
!!!

Impressive for many reasons, not least of which is the number of kits you cobbled together into miniatures that seem entirely natural.
a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice.
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Offline voltan

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.13 the Haradrim - plus Mumakil!)
« Reply #193 on: January 15, 2021, 06:48:44 PM »
You have been busy, I think a fifty cal would look better though.
Yvan eht nioj!

Online AKULA

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Re: Captain Blood's Tolkien Orc Kitbash (p.13 the Haradrim - plus Mumakil!)
« Reply #194 on: January 15, 2021, 07:22:46 PM »
Excellent kitbashery Richard as always...impressed by the sheer variety of parts used, but it’s definitely paid off.

 :)

Must add some of those FF Russians to my list...oh, and if you don’t like the FF Byzantine heads, I’d be happy to take them off your hands...I ended up trimming some of them to fit, but I can always do with more for my unsullied  :D

 

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