It has been much too long since my last update! There are several reasons for this, not least of which was going back to Ohio to visit family over the holiday weekend. With that said, it is great to be back and have some hobby progress to share with you. I hope it proves to be worth the wait!
First up, I finished painting another Hunter Orc on Fell Warg which brings me to four completed. I think this is the fastest one I have painted yet and I feel like I had a much better idea of how to paint orc skin by the end of this guy than I ever have before. With four done, it is daunting to think that I still have eight more of these plus 12 wargs without riders to paint to play all of the scenarios in An Unexpected Journey. That is definitely going to be a long term goal because I seem to need a month at minimum between painting each one.
I have made some terrain progress for Roast Mutton however. I managed to get my first two trees done but it was not without some incident. First of all, I used Woodland Scenics products to make these pine trees and I followed their guidelines for making them which was a big mistake. In particular, I used Hob-E-Tac as the glue which is amazingly tacky/sticky but it never fully dries! It also becomes completely worthless if it is wet. So humidity is a problem and so is applying a layer of watered down PVA which you do to make the foliage rock hard and really stuck to the plastic armature. So for the first tree, I started spraying it with Woodland Scenics Scenic Cement (watered down PVA) and all of the foliage falls off! I was shocked and frustrated. Since then, I stuck with PVA glue for the foliage and they’re coming out much better and in less time. These two trees are not likely to shed anytime soon and quite imposing. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t call these done yet as they need to be based. I think I’m going to order some MDF terrain bases from a place in England to save me the effort of having to do the MDF myself and because these trees are almost impossible to stand up without them being based. I would do that anyway as I think trees look best that way but I’m hoping that all the work will be worth it for Roast Mutton and any other times I use these trees. I’ll share some more pictures and progress when I get them fully done in a month or so. For now, I’m focused on getting as many of trees done as I can so they can fill up my table.
A couple of days ago, I started a non-MESBG painting project (Warhammer 40,000 to be specific) that is going to take up some of my time so I may post an update about that in the near future as I’d like to keep the content coming as best I can!
Kuribo's Painting 
Looking great Kuribo! I think we are both doing something similar: painting minis and making terrain that will be used in the scenarios of our campaign. In that way I can definitely say the wait will be worth it! Because even if the scenario is disappointing, the joy of having played on a beautiful table, with wonderfully painted minis is so great, especially if you’re the one who’s responsible for it!
That said, it seems you are much more patient than I am. I would’ve just batch painted all those Wargs and Riders in one go. I really appreciate your attention to detail and painting. Though I do hope it will stay fun for yourself and you can reap more rewards (by playing scenarios) sooner rather than later. On the upside, those Wargs and Riders will be used in a lot of scenarios in the Hobbit campaign afterwards, so every one you finish brings you one step closer to that goal! Do you think you’ll plan on continuing the Hobbit campaign after Unexpected Journey (so Desolation of Smaug and the Battle of the Five Armies)?
By the way, your trees came out great! Good looking trees such as those are my favourite type of terrain feature, I just really love trees (minis and actual ones). I’ve tried creating my own many years ago for Fangorn forest but the project was too frustrating for me that I just decided to buy them pre-assembled and ready out of the box. Since then I’ve bought from different brands and while not nearly as nice as the custom ones you show here, I’m pretty happy with them and it made it easy for me to quickly (and relatively cheaply) own over 50 different trees. Do you plan to make all of them yourself or do you reckon you will add some pre-made ones as well?
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Thanks for dropping by and for your kind words! For me, the joy is as much in having a beautiful painted mini, piece of terrain, or even table to play on as anything else. I hope it inspires others to try and achieve their own goals in the hobby as well. Hopefully, I’m doing that on here and on the One Ring 🙂
Its funny you mention that because I actually can’t stand batch painting. It literally drives me crazy! So I find that I have a bunch of projects going at once and I paint one or a couple of smaller troops and then take a break and paint something else. I would be interested in doing There and Back Again as a campaign but that will be many years down the road and I don’t have a copy of that book yet unfortunately. So for now, it will definitely be AUJ and then Scouring of the Shire. Who knows where I’ll go from there 🙂 Gondor at War is somewhat tempting but I’d love to play the Fellowship of the Ring scenarios at some point too.
I really thought about just buying trees to save time and I certainly wasted plenty of time on these two but ultimately, I suspect I will keep making my own terrain to save money and to have the satisfaction of knowing I made it all myself (or mostly anyway). Other than the long drying times, trees are fairly fun to make and the results seem to speak for themselves. I think they look better than most of the pre-made stuff as well. I figure if nothing else, it will make me a more skilled hobbyist which is always good 😀
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Nice work on the pair of trees – you’ve definately got more patience thn I do these days, though we we discussed elsewhere I do have to hand it to cratch-built trees for an amazing look when finished.
I very much like the Warg Rider as well!
If you don’t mind a suggestion from me about painting units like the Warg, my own method is a …compromise? hybrid? of Batch and Single miniature painting. Basically, starting with the full 8 or 10 or 12 and batch-painting every stage until you get to a point where you now work on only 4 or 5 or 6 of them, then you drop to 2 or 3 as you get into the finer, details (which are more fun for me), and then finally you finish them as single miniatures. Then the next single miniature has only a few bits left to do, and so on…
Basically, doing models this way makes the early “grunt work” go faster due to batch painting principles, while still leaving the painting of finer details in a “single model” type of situation.
I should expand that into a full blog post.
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Thank you! I’m hoping the trees I built can be used for a lifetime of gaming (or at least as much as someone in their 30’s can muster!) but we’ll see how things go. That is an interesting thought. I need to take whatever steps I can to paint things faster as I spend way more time painting than gaming lately and I have so many ongoing projects that I feel like it will be a year before any of them get finished. I would love to see your suggestions/workflow if you don’t mind typing it up and posting it on the Bitz Box!
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I’ll add it to the list of posts to write when I get a chance to breathe. 🙂
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Hob-e-tac is the worse and I had the exact same experience. The stuff never dried completely. You are not alone.
Well painted orc and the trees came out good in the end. I’ve had success basing my trees on metal washers. It makes them bottom heavy (like me) and harder to knock over.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 7:53 PM Battles in Middle Earth wrote:
> Kuribo posted: “It has been much too long since my last update! There are > several reasons for this, not least of which was going back to Ohio to > visit family over the holiday weekend. With that said, it is great to be > back and have some hobby progress to share with you” >
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I should have known better as I had heard that Hob-e-tac was not the best for wargaming but some lessons are best learned the hard way. Thanks for the tip on metal washers! I would have never thought of that and these trees certainly need something as they annoyingly fall over with the slightest breeze.
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