Thank you
The next painted contingent completed - scummy orc bowmen.
Once again kitbashed from a variety of plastic sets, plus a little Green Stuff here and there (hoods, capes etc).
The heads are mainly Oathmark goblin in origin, although there’s another Mantic ghoul head in there too (getting my money’s worth out of that Salute freebie!)
I’ve also finished the first of my trolls.
He’s an Atlantis Miniatures orc. I bought six of these (they make about 10 different ones). They’re absolutely gorgeous models - insanely detailed, superbly cast, and with wonderful character - but they don’t look anything like orcs to me.
They do, however, look a lot like how I’ve always imagined trolls to look. Hurray!
Just realised, I missed his goatee - ah well, it can be a wart
Here's Bert, along with his pals yet to be painted…
These boys are supposedly 28mm scale, but come up at about 45mm high including the base (I’ve dispensed with the slottas – slottas, eeeyurgggh – and replaced them with a similarly chunky bases of my own making, to give them that bit of extra stature).
Tolkien never says exactly how big trolls are. Tom, Bert and Bill in ‘The Hobbit’ are simply described as ‘three very large persons’.
I guess that 45mm would make my trolls about nine feet tall, if we take a regular 28mm figure as being around six foot? They’re also extremely butch and beefy. Nowhere near as gigantic as the Weta/Jackson trolls, but plenty big enough to stand out amongst my rabble of orcs.
Atlantis Miniatures do an even larger range of equally wonderful ogres, which are half as big again – about 65mm tall. But their armour, weapons etc, are a bit more sophisticated. Whereas my vision of trolls is that they are very primitive in their gear and weapons.
Anyway, here’s the evil horde so far, mustering sur le table...
I’ve also done a test build of a warg rider - he’s basically just an Oathmark goblin wolf rider.
I must confess I’m not really sold on the Oathmark giant wolves themselves though. The faces are good, but they're strangely hairless beasts apart from a ruff and the tail. These alas, look a lot more like feathers than fur. I’ve noticed the one thing plastic moulding is just terrible at rendering, is fur. It always seems to come out looking look more like stylised feathers. Or leaves.
Luckily, we have Green Stuff, which is excellent for portraying fur and hair. So wolfie has had a generous layer added (wargs should look shaggy, dammit), and the rider has a new fur cape.
I'll get him painted and decide if further adjustments are needed, before I make up the whole dastardly troop...
Next up, the first lift of painted Haradrim…