Finishing in Bits and Pieces.

After exactly a month, the four Eowyns that I started in November are painted. The mounted one still needs to have the horse painted, but Eowyn herself still counts as done.

During this time, I have decided that to address the issue of unpainted models in my collection, I will not assemble any more models until such time as I paint a number of models equal to the number I intend to assemble. I've started off this by painting Arod from Legolas and Gimli mounted which I started over two years ago and haven't worked on since until three days ago.

This new rule excludes the models that I currently have in various states or preparedness from before Christmas (being Treebeard, Merry, Pippin, Paladin Took, Fatty Bolger, all three Beorn models, the new Thorin and Bilbo, unarmoured Celeborn, Elrond foot and mounted, and the new Legolas). I will only allow myself to finish preparing these models once I've finished painting all partially painted models I've got (Eowyn's horse, two Gollums, Gandalf, Galadriel and Saruman from the White Council set, and Merry and the Witch-king to go with Eowyn on the diorama base.

This means that when I get new models, they'll be sitting around in their box for quite a while, except for a quick check for casting defects. The only exception to this will be Smaug, who deserves to be worked on straight away.

Photo time now. I've been playing around again with my set up, so not all photos were created equally.

First up, more on my Nazgul and Prey diorama.

Armoured Eowyns. The faces look a bit derp because the lighting messed with the camera detecting lighter colours.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Finally, after making their debut here in late 2012, I give you Legolas and Gimli on Arod!

Next time I hope to have completed images of the partially done models mentioned earlier, but until then, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

I'm still here.

Alive, not really kicking. But with rumors of Smaug gracing the internet the last few days, and some lovely character models over the last two weeks, I thought I should paint something in the lead up.

Mounted Thranduil is an exciting model for me, and I'm particularly chuffed that he's not on his goddamned Elk, because I really hate that thing. Smaug will be the deciding factor in my next round of purchases. Should he be confirmed, I'll buy him straight away, maybe with the new Thorin, Fili and Kili (and whatever other members of the company come with them given their funny set arrangement). If Smaug doesn't happen, then I'll get all the characters to have come out so far in this wave.

I'm breaking my own rule of not batch painting a bit here by doing the skin, mail, and hair of 4 Eowyns at once, but I need to feel like I'm getting something done, and these areas are simple enough that batch painting won't look too bad. I do feel that the Perry's dropped to ball a bit when they did mtd Eowyn's face as the nose is rather squashes and there's no definition for the lips. Perhaps the dropped ball landed on her face. I'm also plagued by the fact that the notes I took when painting my last Eowyn's face and hair have gone missing. At least the gist of the skin is simple - Elf Flesh, washes of Ogryn Flesh, add white, more washes.

But hey, it's something, right? After this batch section, I'll bring Eowyn with shield to completion, and do Merry and the Witch-king to complete the diorama. I'll be really happy to see that finished and on display.

Picture isn't great, but it illustrates the point of this posting that I'm at least doing things.

Until next time.

And I Never Sculpted Fire Again

Unless I somehow end up with a second Denethor... maybe... I kinda hope not...

Anyway, I'm done with these guys until I get to painting them. I have two particular favourites that I look forward to painting, the other three will be a bit of a grind for the sake of getting them all done.

Undercoated Aragorn for the sake of completeness (if I didn't know about that arm....) :

Now that I've got all this puttying out of my system, I'm at a crossroads for what to paint next. On one hand, I've got the Fate of the Witch-king to finish up, but on the other hand, getting the Ringwraiths and Aragorn done would be good too. Maybe I'll hold off on painting this Aragorn because his garb is very similar to the Aragorn I painted a few weeks back - I could to Weathertop Aragorn instead. Hardly solves my problem though....

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Learning as I go

Aragorn's done. As far as sculpting goes anyway. He's undercoated and on the shelf with all the other ready-for-painting models to be done when time allows. I don't have pictures yet, and didn't think to take any before writing up this post.

I've also begun on the other four Ringwraiths. On them, I bulked out the flames first, and allowed the putty to set before moving on. I've only sculpted a couple of flames on each one, so that I don't interfere with the work while working... if that makes any sense.

Whilst doing this, I noted that they looked a lot better than the wraith I posted yesterday. I think the reason yesterday's wraith looked so poor is because of the height of the flames, and their distance apart. The fires on the others aren't as tall, and there's more closer together. They look significantly more natural. In an effort to fix the first one, I've tried to fill gaps between some of the fires, but there's only so much that can be done.

As can be seen, this one looks a lot better than the previous, even though he's far from done and most of the spikes are just cones of putty waiting to be covered later. It will take me several sessions spread across as many days to get them all finished.

I did have a moment this morning where I was absolutely kicking myself - yesterday I stripped two Balrogs - a plastic one, and a metal one, both in the same pose. In my desire to have one of every pose, the plastic one is somewhat surplus to my needs (whereas the metal one with whip wouldn't be when I find one of those). This means that sitting on my shelf are some plastic fires that I could have cut up and used as the basis of these conversions. Sculpting to join bits of those flames to the Nazgul would have been a hell of a lot easier. Oh well!

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

I See Fire.... burning the Nazgul

...but it's far from done. In applying the putty and trying to make fire shapes straight away I realised I had made a big mistake. Luckily, only one wraith was going to be done. The putty wasn't staying put as I tried to manipulate it.

I am far from done with this one. In light of what I learned getting it this far, I will go back tomorrow and make more separate tongues of fire by building off the ones that are already there, and add lots of small bits in between the giant spikes that are there now. A couple of spots look okay from some angles, but overall it looks incredibly awkward, and I won't declare it done until it looks good from all angles. It's definitely going to be much more of a challenge that I initially anticipated - and I didn't expect it to be easy back then. I can't wait to get this Derpwraith to a better place.

I'm not totally down about it - I have learned about how to approach largely unsupported areas with an armature (unsupported as in "not enclosed like Boromir's arm"), and it is at least a step in the right direction to a point where visualising the final image isn't so far fetched as it was looking at wires. It's left me with an outlook on the project that is both sulky and eager.

Aragorn has also seen some work, and he too will need another session to thicken his arm and work some more on making his hand to thumb transition look better, as well as rounding the dagger handle a bit to make its cross-section elliptical instead of rectangular. For now, I'm a lot happier with him than the Nazgul above, and he's been a lot more forgiving to the same mistakes that I made on the wraith.

I also mentioned in my last post the need for more tools. Last night I rigged up a temporary tool using some twisted wire and the back end of a woodcut knife handle. It's good enough for working on smooth curves that aren't too deep, and i used it for Aragorn's arm a lot. It and my compass will remain my mainstay choices until I can make some more permanent tools using THIS GUIDE which is makes it quite achievable to make one's own professional quality tools.

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks (and me to my dinner because I'm hungry)!

You're Fired!

Some time ago, I recall seeing a conversion of some Nazgul to be set on fire done by One Ringer ukfreddybear. With the image in my mind, and some spare sub-quality Wraiths sitting around, I thought I'd try my hand at something similar, though to begin with, all I had in mind was that I wanted bigger flames than the ones I'd previously seen - walking bonfires in their full glory.

Example of poor quality pre-conversion Wraith:

Even though in the movie not all the Ringwraiths at Weathertop left in flames, I wanted to make five in case scenario play has a different outcome in the future. I decided that the following poses were best suited to escaping the flames. The undercoated one is from my first Nazgul set, and his sword is made of styrene, the other four are from the replacement set.

The next step was to figure out how I wanted to approach the sculpting. Wanting big flames, I decided that a wire armature would be in order. Were I just doing smaller flames, I probably wouldn't bother. I proceeded to drill several holes in each model where I wanted the largest tongues to be. Drilling onto the convex, high-curvature surfaces of outstretched arms was a bit of a pain, but I got there in the end. Bubbles in the finecast turned out to be quite useful here, and most of the holes I drilled are where bubbles used to be. Swiss cheese anyone?

Next, I cut up a bunch of wire, each piece about 3cm long. I have no intention of making the flames this big, I just wanted to have too much to work with than too little. At this point, I can't decide whether Vlad has been doing too much impaling, the Iron Throne has somehow come to life and attacked them, or if they have the same fungal disease that causes spiders to leave some pretty interesting corpses. It may also be that they're mutating into hedgehogs. After gluing the wires into place, and bending them to reflect the movements of each model that would have led up to their current poses, I cut the wire to a more appropriate length. As you can see in the second picture, one wraith will have the stick stuck in his face from the movie.

I have also recently obtained a few goodies:
Aragorn, Gimli, Lurtz, Merry and Pippin from the Ambush at Amon Hen set
Pippin from the vs. Grishnakh set
Arwen on foot with her sword in one hand
Gandalf (Heroes of the West)
Twilight Wraith with his sword raised
Three Kings of Men that I was missing
Sam from Weathertop, and the one drawing his sword
Frodo that goes with the Sam drawing his sword
Mirror of Galadriel.
There's also an Uruk Battering Ram in the post.

Because he was missing his left arm, Aragorn was thrown into the mix for free. With the help of One Ring member valpas in the form of a photo of the model, I've been able to get an idea of exactly where the missing arm should be in relation to the body. So far it's just a bit of wire and a cut out dagger (you can see the dagger before I cut it out in the first picture in this post). Even though the dagger handle looks a bit big, it's actually the same width as the sword's handle.

I hope to get to sculpting in the next couple of days. I'm a little hesitant to start yet because I usually use the spike of a compass, and I'm not sure how useful that will be for getting the smoother parts of Aragorn's arm and the Wraith's flames to look right, so I'll look into alternative tools before I start.


Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

I am no man

But I'm not here to announce a sudden gender reassignment either.

I've been working on this a little bit over the last week. I've never made a box like this to display models on, and thus was completely unaware how difficult it would actually be to make a seamless cuboid. Black foamboard surrounded in 0.5mm Evergreen sheet styrene, and paper glued over the top to try to help hide the styrene-styrene joins and styrene-card joins. The... well what would they be called? ...plaques, I suppose, are made of balsa that I etched with a 2000mW handheld infrared laser pointer (I spent a lot of money earlier in the year buying up lasers right before NZ law changed to make them practically impossible to get), and surrounded in more styrene painted gold, and held in place by "nails" of brass rod. There are identical plaques on both sides. The problem with doing my own laser etching is that any variations in speed, or in distance to the laser, end up fairly obvious in the final product.

The balsa was stained with watered down Steel Legion Drab, followed by watered down Rhinox Hide, and then black to give a similar look to walnut wood (I've like the colouration of walnut ever since I got myself a one ring replica from Weta that came in a walnut box).

I've yet to progress beyond the base because the Witch-king's sword hand was missing (luckily the guy I bought these off found it, and at the same time I've bought a bunch of other stuff off him which should arrive later this week/early next).

Even though I've already glued the Fell Beast's head on, I might go back and repaint its skin because after applying a second black wash to it, it's looking a little shiny. I'm also tempted to add some Woodland Scenics Field Grass to that base to eventually hide Merry's jawline, because the sculpting of his jaw (and face in general) is a bit of a let down. More than anything, I think that will depend on how it goes painting him though.

I've never really bothered to paint my models to be weathered and dirty, mostly because I'm always concerned that I'll screw up a nice paintjob if I do. I think good weathering is quite difficult to achieve with paint, both in getting the right dusty colour, and in application so as to actually look like dust ingrained in fabric. These models deserve the extra effort.


Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Re-shoot

I ended up taking new pics of Galadriel after I did a little more to the metallics. I managed to get better lighting and saturation on these, which makes me very happy.

In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a Queen...

"...not dark, but beautiful..." etc. etc. and so on.

My entry for the One Ring August competition is finished. This was, without any doubt, the most confusing model I have ever tried to paint. Since the iconic look in the films was done mostly with intense lighting techniques, I began with no idea what colour her gown was supposed to be. This left several options to painting:
A) Paint her with grey/white cloth like it would have been in the films before they threw blue light at her.
B) Paint her with grey/white cloth, then throw OSL onto the model.
C) Paint her as if the gown was the blue/green/grey that it appeared after the lighting effects in the film.

I went with option C for the following reason:

For the most part, I exclusively use the layering technique when painting models, as I forever struggle to keep paint wet long enough to blend properly. However, on surfaces with a "high gradient" (ie. change in elevation on the model over a short distance), layering is very difficult, and on Galadriel, there is continuously high gradient across the vast majority of the surface of the model. Thus, C being the easiest of the three options, I chose it to allow me to focus on adaptation of my highlighting process, which ended up a funny combination of layering, edge highlighting, and letting natural light do its thing.

Another challenge was choosing the colours, and I spent several hours this morning figuring out what paints to use. Such an "unrealistic" colour scheme is just so alien to me.

I can't say I'm totally happy, but she'll do because I don't want to go back to her again.

The blueness in the second and third progress pictures is more accurate to the final product, and the background I was using messed that up a bit. Getting semi-decent pictures was tough because of all the shadows the model casts, so I won't be going and retaking them.

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Fix ups are forever.

It's official, elveses for the August painting competition, and I will be doing wraith-Galadriel. I never know exactly what to call the model, but it's her 'What if I had the Ring" thing.

 Before I get anything more than an undercoat on her, however, I feel the need to deal to my latest batch of stripped and new models. It seems to be my curse that any second hand mounted heroes need a bit of fixing up. The way this is going, when I finally get hold of a warg attack Theoden, I'll probably have to sculpt an entire arm. In this batch, mounted Strider had a broken horse leg, hardly a complicated fix, and not worth photographing.

There was also mounted King Elessar, and Legolas. In this case, Legolas is a fourth-hand model. It originally belonged to my brother about seven years ago, then to me when he stopped collecting soon after. After that, I sold it to a mate, and now recently re-acquired it. Through this chain of ownership, I knew it had a miscast bow, where the top half was warped and shrunken. To this end, I removed the offending bow limb, and constructed a new one from two sheets of 0.5mm plastic glued together. I also had to fix up a hoof that I had mangled when I originally assembled the model for my brother.

Elessar was a little more complex to fix. I got the model through the interwebs, and all I knew was that it had been stripped of paint before I got it (evident by the discolouration of the metal). When it arrived with me, I found that I had been supplied with the sword arm of the foot version. I removed the lower hand on the sword, and drilled into the hand a couple of millimeters before gluing in some brass rod. Because I couldn't get a stable drilling surface directly beneath Anduril's blade, I had to cut the sword between the hand and crossguard, and move it around a bit. Some trimming was also necessary at the top of the arm to get it so sit right in the shoulder. The shoulder on the model now is formed by the underarm of the foot model. Finally, I sculpted the ornate shoulder armour on, and raised the cloak over top of the armour.

Because I had a little putty leftover after this, I decided to stick it on a base and replicate the rare invisible Frodo, essentially a base with sculpted footprints on it. A useless piece, but fun all the same.

When the putty sets, I'll get all the bases sanded and models undercoated. There's a total of eight mounted and twelve foot heroes to do in this batch. Afterwards, Galadriel will meet the brush.

Until next time, may the wind beneath your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!