Ride to Golden Demon Ruin!

While I’ve knocked out the odd mini here and there for Scouring of the Shire, I’m still waiting on my item from Poland to work on the terrain.  As a result, I want to have a “special post” where I share was the progress I’ve made on Theoden for Golden Demon.  I don’t share these updates outside of this website as I don’t want everyone to see the entry before the event.  I’ve heard other pro painters do that so I figure I might as well follow suit!  I’ve put a fair amount of time into him recently over the break up until now and I finally feel like I’m getting close to having him done short of touch ups.

The front of him doesn’t look radically different since you last saw but as you can see, outside of his sword, he is mostly done now.  The sword is giving me some grief as I tried to start working on it and had to strip off the paint and start again.  I was very worried before stripping off the paint, as the sword was looking pretty bumpy and I was worried I had messed up the surface.  Fortunately, I think its going to be okay and I just have to be a little more patient.

The back of Theoden came together pretty well.  I didn’t have much trouble with any of it and over the holiday break, I had enough free time that it was easy to plow through the time consuming parts like the scale mail.

The part I am most proud of though is the shield.  I went for a Wizard of Oz like green pattern that looks pretty sharp, I must say.  This is a situation where instead of trying to match the movies exactly (which often used very dull colors for clothing), I went for something really bold and different to hopefully help this mini stand out.  I’m happy with how the shield looks though I can see that I didn’t do a good enough job on the outside edges of the gold trim on the front of the shield and the outside rim of the shield is not as smooth as I would like.  I’m not sure if I can or will be able to fix these things but painting perfection is incredibly hard to achieve and I’ve certainly never come close.  The amount of patience it takes to paint things like this is unreal.  It isn’t strictly a game of skill, it is often about patience and who can paint the most impressive project (scale of figure, has a conversion, etc.) in the best way possible.  With that said, I’m hardly a pro painter and just a hobbyist trying to achieve as much as he can in this hobby that I thoroughly enjoy.  I am starting to look forward to the Golden Demon and seeing how this mini performs after a few months of low motivation.