I have been hard at work and enjoying my painting since my post last week. I’ve been focusing on getting stuff done and not worrying if every little thing doesn’t come out perfectly. It can be liberating to paint in this way and I’m sure that is why I’ve been enjoying painting a lot lately.
Before we visit the Shire, I did finish another hill piece which I am quite pleased with. I felt like the Trolls would knock down some trees around the area where they lived so making some hills with tree stumps seemed like the perfect way to show this and hopefully add a bit of character to the board as well. The MDF base also helped inspire this terrain as it looked perfect for a couple of small hills. I think I got the incline on the hills just right as the most recent warg rider fit on there very well. It is a shame I didn’t have this done for Roast Mutton but I think it will look nicely on any future playthroughs and for future scenarios.
Even nicer than that, is having Farmer Maggot and his dogs done. Well except for the bases which I will do once I make some Shire terrain as I want them to match the terrain as much as possible. It surprised me how quick and easy to paint all of these minis were. The dogs, except for Fang (he’s the one all the way to the right), were easier to paint than expected and Farmer Maggot is pretty simple himself. While I stuck close to GW’s schemes for the dogs I decided to give Maggot darker hair as blond doesn’t stand out much against the color of his apron.
Finishing up Farmer Maggot has got me thinking. I only need to paint up some Ruffians and I could play a scenario from the Scouring of the Shire! Well, except for needing some terrain too. I have been trying to decide how I want to do my terrain for the Scouring scenarios because the largest board size I would need is 4×4. I was originally going to use my battle mat but since playing Roast Mutton, I’ve realized that I want to up the visual appeal even higher and create an actual board with flock so everything matches perfectly like I wanted the Eriador board to do. The nice thing is that I don’t need to create a lot of hills for a Shire board as the scenarios don’t require them and so I can just make those as scatter terrain instead of sculpted into the board tiles. I need to create something modular to fit into my small closet but I haven’t figured out exactly what I will use yet. I’ve seen some intriguing modular tiles out there and may end up going down that road. One of these days, I will do a somewhat dry post where I list all of the projects/scenarios I’m working towards and list out what I need to do for them. Truthfully, it is a lot and there is a lot of work to go and I don’t always track it or work towards the goals very efficiently. I’ll save that for another day and keep trying to find a good solution for my Shire board as it won’t be too long before I can think about building it 🙂
Kuribo's Painting 
Nice work on Mutton and the dogs! One day I’ll paint mine, though I’ve recently fished out my Neglected Samwise for a place on the painting desk – so no new Hobbits until the ones I’ve started are done. Besides, I got a reminder that only Pippin and Merry (and Aragorn) are still needed for the first bunch of Fellowship scenarios…
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Thank you and very nice on getting Samwise on the painting desk! I am in a similar position where if I finally paint Merry and Frodo, I’ll have all of the Hobbits done and can play some scenarios with them in the Fellowship scenarios. I don’t want to get diverted from the projects I have going but those scenarios seem like they’d be an awful lot of fun! I’d certainly love to see you write up a battle report or two on your experiences playing the Fellowship scenarios as the consensus is that they are generally pretty fun.
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Oh, and did you ever play LotRO? They had a really nice rendition of Hobbiton in that game that may well be quite inspirational to you if you’re looking at making a board, or even just individual terrain pieces…
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Its funny you mention that! I downloaded the game and made a new account just to run around Hobbiton again and see what it looked like. Their version is certainly more rugged (with lots more trees and bushes) than where it was shot in New Zealand but I’m of the opinion after making a bit of terrain that you can’t really model the set in New Zealand all that realistically and make it wargaming friendly (as lots of grass, especially tallish grass, just doesn’t work well). I think I will be using their version more as inspiration and I love the hedges they have in various places so I could see that making an appearance on my board too.
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Yeah, the designs are obviously of the same place but with very different ends in mind – the movie being to be photogenic while the game is meant for traversal (and even locations for combat). The cobblestone paths around, the wells and water fountain, the inn, the river…. you could do a lot based off of LotRO.
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Absolutely. I may talk a bit more about that here on the site whenever I get around to making the scatter terrain. Still trying to figure out what I’m going to do for the board portion first but once I get that, I’m sure I’ll throw myself into the making the rest of the terrain! 🙂
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Take a look at gluing a flock mat over shaped foam, etc. The model railroad guys have that down to a fine art, lots of tutorials, etc.
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That’s a great suggestion mate. I’ll give it a look and I’ll figure out how I want to build the board itself too. Probably going to need to make some plywood or mdf for that part which will be a new thing for me to learn about too 😀
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Lovely painting. Any chance you could offer a painting guide for Fang please!? What paints did you use?
Thanks!
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Thanks for the kind words! It was quite a while ago when I painted this so I don’t know how specific I can be in terms of paint colors. In looking at the pictures, I think what I did was paint the brown spots with Dryad Bark from GW. The main fur was done with Karak Stone and some kind of brown mixed in. I’d give Dryad Bark a try but it might be a different GW brown color. You’ll have to play around a bit and see what you like there. If you keep your paints thin with water or Lahmia Medium and try to layer the shadows and highlights in, you should be able to get pretty good results. That’s the best advice I can give I’m afraid and I hope it helps! 🙂
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