The road goes ever on and on...

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Grace, age 10, is my little reader. Over the course of the summer, between 4th and 5th grades, she devoured a lot of books, not the least of which were all 7 of the Harry Potter books (4,193 pages in total). She reads new books as fast as we can find them for her.

Tonight, when getting ready for bed, she asked me if we had anything else for her to read. A thought occurred to me. We went down to the living room ("library") and I took a sacred book off the shelf. The Hobbit. If she can read all seven books of Harry Potter, she can certainly read this. She may even be disappointed/underwhelmed by The Hobbit. I hope not. It is a book that holds a special place in my heart, and I hope she enjoys it. And after that, I hope she reads and enjoys The Lord of the Rings.

I can't help but to wonder what a kid these days will think of these books, having been exposed to a lot more than I ever was at that age, just in terms of what she will have seen in movies and on TV.

These were magical books to me. I hope they are to her as well.

Far over the Misty Mountains cold,
To dungeons deep and caverns old,
We must away, ere break of day,
To seek our pale enchanted gold.

Rohan Foot Warriors

Over the last few weeks, to take a break from the various terrain and re-basing projects I have been working on, I managed to finish up a small contingent of 12 foot warriors of Rohan. These are from Games Workshop's The Lord of the Rings range, and are decent quality plastic figures. Most plastic figure kits you see these days are multi part kits with swappable arms, heads, weapons, etc... These are not like that. Either because they are some of the earlier plastics from GW, or maybe "just because", these are single piece figures with add on shields. As a result, you get a lot of repetition when building a decent sized force. That's the downside. The upside is that these figures can be cleaned, primed and ready to paint very quickly as opposed to many of the other kits these days where the assembly alone is a major project.

These were painted similarly to the Riders posted back on March 26, 2011, seen here. The only real difference with these is that I cut a few corners to speed the process up, and instead of using an Army Painter dip, I used a water-based brown wash (GW's discontinued "Devlan Mud"). I skimped a little on the highlighting also. I am happy enough with them, and they fit the bill nicely for what I was trying to accomplish - finished!

Next up in the fantasy world, next time I venture in that direction, will be completing a block of Uruk Hai infantry for my Isengard force.

Riders of Rohan

Finished figures. Eight Riders of Rohan. Will wonders never cease...

Riders of Rohan - Batch 1 in Process

What began as an exercise in "gee, I wonder how well this will work" has turned into a very promising way for me to actually get some of my Lord of the Rings figures painted to a decent level of quality in a reasonable amount of time. For the time challenged like me, this is the holy grail of painting.

In my prior post I detailed my game plan for painting Riders of Rohan. Having come up with a manageable set of steps that produced an acceptable quality figure, the real test would be whether I could produce a batch of figures efficiently. Happily, I seem to be able to do just that - the photo below shows 7 more figures done through stage 3. Stage 1 being priming, stage 2 basic color blocking, and stage 3 being the dip shading followed by a matte clearcoat to knock down the gloss. Knowing that the dip shading helps hide little mistakes, I was able to paint these figs to this point in perhaps a little over an hour. Only the basic highlighting and final highlighting stages remain. When all is said and done I should be able to have completed these figures in less than 3 hours. And they will look very nice. For me, that's fast.

Two other thoughts do occur to me. First, assembly lining a larger batch of figures at one time would make this even more efficient (if a little more boring). Second, I am admittedly picky about the quality of figures I like to use in a game, and I am pretty pleased to see that the shaded figures at this stage of painting (with no additional highlighting) could very easily be used as is. Finishing the bases with these figures exactly as is would still look pretty good.

Oooh Shiny! - Painting a Rider of Rohan

I have loved the Lord of the Rings since reading it for the first time as a boy. When the movies were released, Games Workshop licensed the figure rights, and have produced an extensive range of miniatures in metal and plastic that faithfully depict everything as shown in the movies. Being a wargamer and such a big fan, I have accumulated a good number of these figures, but have painted very few of them as yet. Of all the different things available, I have largely (but not completely) limited myself to buying Dwarves and Goblins for Moria as well as Rohan and Isengard for Helm's Deep. I have assembled virtually all of the figures, but only painted some Moria stuff.

Ride to ruin and the world's ending!
Over the last few days, my attention has drifted towards Rohan. I caught some of the Return of the King on TV within the last week or so, and saw the scene of the Ride of the Rohirrim at the siege of Minas Tirith. With it seems to have come the apparently uncontrollable urge to paint some Riders of Rohan. So I am taking the opportunity to see if I can come up with a manageable scheme to crank some of these out quickly and efficiently while still putting out a respectable quality figure that will look nice in mass on the battlefield.

I worked through one prototype figure today, and this is what I have come up with. The key for speed on these will be a dark brown primer coat instead of my usual black, and my first full scale use of "the dip". Given the color scheme of Rohan troops in the movies, the brown primer coat will allow me to save lots of time by effectively painting the horse in one go as well as bits of the rider as well.

Apologies in advance for my persistent inability to plan ahead for proper lighting and backdrop for the pictures, but then again I wasn't planning to do this project at all. I should be painting Crusaders...

Stage 1 - Primer Coat
Figures were primed in several light coats using Army Painter's "Leather Brown" spray. This gave me a jump on stage 2, as the basic color for the horse and several pieces of equipment on the rider would be this brown color. I will remember to apply sand and grit to the bases of the other figures before priming to give me a head start on the final bases as well.

Stage 2 - Blocking in Basic Colors
The goal of this step would be to neatly but quickly paint the basic colors on the figure. This will be the prep work for "dipping" the figure in stage 3.

Undercloak and helmet - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Shadow Flesh".
Cloak - Vallejo Game extra opaque "Heavy Blackgreen".
Tunic - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Dark Rust".
Skin - Citadel Foundation "Tallarn Flesh".
Hair - Citadel "Bubonic Brown".
Armor - Citadel "Boltgun Metal".
Saddle blanket, horse harness, sword scabbard, boots, horse mane and tail - Citadel "Scorched Brown".
Primer coat of "Leather Brown" was left on the horse, bow, shin guards and quiver.

Stage 3 - The Dip
I have never done this before, but using a "dip" as a means of shading a figure certainly has a longstanding tradition in figure painting, and has become increasingly mainstream as a result of the Army Painter line of products. A "dip" is basically wood stain such as Minwax or the like in a brown tone of some sort. It is thin enough to flow into crevices and low spots on a figure to provide easy and effective shading while being thick enough to hold in those spots and not just run off like water. Some people actually grab a figure by the base, flip it over and dunk it into the stain. I chose to paint my dip onto the figure liberally using a 3/4 inch (big) brush. This was my first attempt at this, but it was easy and effective. The trick is to have a feel for getting enough dip on the figure to shade it properly while not being too heavy handed so as to obliterate it.


The dip - Army Painter Quickshade "Strong Tone".
One downside to me is that the dip dries very glossy. So much so that I couldn't continue with the painting (too distracting) until I had hit the figure with a light coat of matte varnish to knock down the gloss.

Stage 4 - First Highlight
The dip I used was a pretty dark tone, so my first highlight was in some cases applying a lighter tone to highlight certain areas, and in other cases simply reapplying the same base color to bring back a little of the original brightness of the color which had been dulled by the dip.

Clothing - The tunic, undercloak and outer cloak all used the original base color as a highlight to bring back some brightness on outer folds and exposed areas.
Horse - Citadel "Bestial Brown".
Skin - Citadel "Dwarf Flesh".
Hair - 50/50 mix of Citadel "Bubonic Brown" and "Bleached Bone".

Stage 5 - Final Highlight
These are intended to be the rank and file of the army, not display pieces or special characters, so I have no intention of lavishing a great amount of time or detail on them. That being said, one last round of highlights to make some detail and edges pop a little is in order.

Horse - Citadel "Snakebite Leather".
Undercloak - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Light Rust".
Cloak - Vallejo Panzer Aces "Italian Tankcrew".
Armor and Metal Details - Citadel "Shining Gold".
Horse tail and mane - drybrush of some light tan color that happened to be on my palette at the moment. Not sure what it was. A rust shade mixed with Bleached Bone I think.

Conclusions
So there you have it. It took me longer to flip through the Games Workshop books and catalogs looking at pictures to try to pick the right colors than it did to actually paint this sample figure. There is a nice little article on the GW site here that gives a step-by-step "how to" on painting one of these figures, but it is geared more towards a higher caliber of painting than I am aspiring to in this particular case. Too much highlighting and detail work, and too much paint mixing. One of the downsides of GW sticking to their own Citadel paint line is the need to spend way too much time mixing paint to fill gaps in their line. The rest of us can buy paints from other manufacturers.

Lastly, a few observations:

• For quick and effective shading on bulk troops, "the dip" may well be the way to go. I do think I will try the shade that is one notch lighter though.
• I have started adding Vallejo brand paints to my largely Citadel inventory and I absolutely love them! Great stuff. Nice flow and good coverage. Although at this point I have used mainly dark and neutral colors, so I am not sure how their paints in the typically difficult red/orange/yellow family perform.
• The plastic kits for the Lord of the Rings line have some ambiguous molding that makes it a little hard to know how to paint them in places. There are spots on the figures where I am not quite sure where one thing ends and another begins. This was true on this figure, and was a consistent issue for me when I painted a box of Moria goblins a while back. Citadel's metal figures never ever have this problem.
• I do love the Lord of the Rings. I freely admit it.
• I am convinced that following the basic plan outline above, I can complete the other 17 Riders of Rohan that are primed and ready to go in fairly short order. Well, fairly short order for me...