The Painting of the Fellowship

To my surprise, I spent most of my time since playing Roast Mutton, painting up more minis from my Breaking of the Fellowship set.  Its nice to have four of the nine done now as one day I’d love to play LOTR scenarios, especially from Fellowship of the Ring .

First up, is Gandalf who I thought I might just be able to really paint well going into this project.  I’m not sure that I ended up achieving that goal because of the difficulties of metal sculpts.  This Gandalf has pronounced bags under his eyes which look like Ian Mckellan but make the eyes really difficult to paint.  The area where the whites and pupils would be are really sunken compared to the bags under his eyes which makes it hard to paint a pupil vertically like you normally would.  I tried to do the best I could with it but am still not totally satisfied with the eyes which aren’t very sharp.  The rest of Gandalf looks pretty good though and I’m happy with it.  It is a cool sculpt which reminds me of the “You Shall Not Pass” scene even if it is kind of funny to get a mini in this set that belongs in Moria when the rest of the minis are in Amon Hen and will be based accordingly.

I obviously decided to make Gandalf look like he is in Moria since that is where I would be most likely to use this mini.  He won’t match the rest of the Breaking of the Fellowship models when I base them but he isn’t really supposed to so that is not a problem.  All in all, he took a bit longer than I would have liked but I had a good time painting him and hopefully he is inspiring to others out there who might want to paint a Moria Gandalf.

I also managed to knock out Legolas and this was my first time painting him.  I had some trouble getting the colors right on his clothes but the rest of him came together fairly well.  The face sculpt is hard to paint with his hands right in front and the details are not great on the face either to be honest but I was happy with how mine came out and I think this is a fairly decent miniature on the whole.  Definitely not as well sculpted as the Hobbits or Gandalf but there are some nice details like on the quiver.

Painting these minis did make me long for some plastic sculpts though.  There are tiny spots on metal minis that inevitably refuse to accept paint or that you just miss while painting.  I know that is why GW used to tell everyone to prime in black but there has to be a better solution than that.

As I’m sure you noticed, I did take these pictures with a plain white background because the gray cloaks these minis have don’t look that great against a grayish/brown background.  I’m reasonably happy with these pictures though I probably should lighten them up just a bit more to get rid of the yellowness of my lighting.  Taking pictures this way does make the metal parts look a little weird and different than they look in-person so I wouldn’t mind coming up with a solution for that too.

That is my hobby progress for the week and while I’m pleased with what I got done, I’m ready to change gears a bit too so we’ll see what I tackle this week.  Perhaps its time to get some more trees made so I can finally have that done.  I desperately need some new sculpts to paint too so I may have to find a solution for that as well.  It will certainly be a surprise to everyone, including myself, what my next update will be about!