Clearing the Backlog: Part 4 - Tournament Motivation

I've said a few times before in this blog that tournaments are a great motivator for getting through your pile of shame – many of my unpainted models have only ever seen the painting table when there's an event on the horizon, whether it's a local event or a GBHL event. 

With no tournaments in the calendar, most of April was spent working on my Ruffians for the Battle Companies Community Challenge – check that out here:
https://eastangliasbg.blogspot.com/2022/05/battle-companies-communities-challenge.html?m=1

Fortunately, May contains arguably one of the best events on the GBHL calendar – The Seven Stones. Two days over the bank holiday weekend, where the main focus of the event is for you and a teammate to come up with a list that's pure fun, rather than the standard competitive lists you'll see at any other GBHL tournament – you won’t find any legendary legions at Seven Stones!

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, Seven Stones hasn’t been hosted since 2019, but on the flip side, that did give Sam Huddy and I three years to plan out our armies. And we settled on the ride out from Helm's Deep – that fantastic scene at the end of The Two Towers where King Theoden and his guard ride out from Helm's Deep into the Uruk-Hai hordes, seeking an end worthy of a song!
I spent most of the Easter bank holiday working on our display board, which incorporates the old Helm's Deep model that was made by GW when the Two Towers sourcebook was released, way back in 2002. Here's a few shots of the board being constructed, along with the finished board and army!

Whilst Sam worked on the majority of the army, my focus was to paint up the various dismounts for our heroes and warriors, along with Gimli, who would also be part of the army. To that end, I grabbed the Gimil, Theoden and Royal Guard who were sitting in my painting queue, along with my Rohan Captain and the mounted version of Theoden. 

Gimli and the Captain were very nice models to paint – the Captain model in particular given the various details he has. A lick of paint later (and a nice scenic base too) and they were both done!

Next, I moved onto Theoden. He's a tricky model to paint at first glance, given the intricacy of the detail on his armour (brown over gold) – I settled for a basecoat of Liberator Gold, then painted the raised details with Rhinox Hide and Dryad Bark. That said, once I started painting him up, it was a case of just taking my time, correcting any mistakes and eventually, he looked pretty good! Snowmane (his horse) also came out pretty well – the barding he has is also very well detailed – I find taking that little bit of extra time to make this stand out really helps separate the model from others on the tabletop.

With Theoden done, I painted up the half a dozen Royal Guard dismounts we needed, and our army was done! We had a fantastic weekend at Seven Stones, and we were thrilled when our efforts were rewarded with a nomination for Best Army!

With Seven Stones over, I turned my attention to the next events on my calendar – a local EAHC event, followed by a GBHL event (Heroes of the Belegaer Sea IV) the week after. Having spent a couple of weeks working on Rohirrim in the build up to Seven Stones, I decided to carry on and finally take a Rohan army to an event.

I'd already painted twelve Warriors for the Throne of Skulls event back in December last year, so I decided to complete the set and paint up the twelve Riders I also had. Que a frenetic two weeks of painting, and I had my mounted captain, twelve Riders of Rohan and a Banner Bearer all painted up!

But who would lead my Rohirrim into battle? Well, in the run up to Seven Stones, I also managed to get the foot version of the plastic Eomer painted up (and a good thing too, considering I started painting him back in November!), so I decided to paint up the mounted version too – and I'm very glad I did. The detail on the model is superb. A couple of evening's work, and the Third Marshall of the Riddermark was ready to ride forth!

So with my Battle Company done, plus the Ride Out from Helm's Deep, Eomer and his Riders, my models painted count for the year now stands at a whopping 109 models! 

I'm really pleased to have only just reached the end of May and already passed the 100 model mark – admittedly there's still a fair way to go in terms of actually clearing my entire backlog, but I think we can safely say very good progress has been made!

This series so far has been quite cathartic for me – clearing 100+ models out of my painting queue makes me feel like I'm actually getting somewhere, rather than thinking my pile of shame will sit there unpainted forever. The new Defence of the North sourcebook will also be a good motivator – I'm sure seeing what the new models and Legendary Legions can do will make me desperate to get some armies painted up and on the tabletop!

Stay tuned for the next blog post and see how progress on the backlog continues. Until next time, happy hobbying! 

Battle Companies Communities Challenge

Over the last few months, a group of hobbyists have each been working on a very special community hobby project.

The challenge – to paint up the starting models for a Battle Company according to the Battle Companies book. Simple enough, right? Well, no. This challenge came with a fiendish twist – our Battle Company would be chosen at random, and so would our colour scheme! Each of the participants entered two random colours into the draw – this mixture of colours would then have to be the main colour scheme for our Battle Company – the deadline for painting them would then be the 30th April.

The mastermind behind this challenge (or evil dark lord – jury's still out on that one) is Dewi Evans, the man behind the Guardians of Wiltshire YouTube channel. A few months ago, a group of us got together and the draw was made. 

So what did I get? There are 18 different Battle Companies available in the book, from The Shire to Goblin Town, so there were plenty of options to be excited about. My turn came around and Sharkey's Rogues was pulled out of the hat. An interesting prospect for me, as I'd never painted a Ruffian model before. Then came the big moment – the colour scheme I would have to paint my company in! 

I got … GREEN AND GOLD!

…Right.

My initial thoughts were "How on earth am I going to paint these guys green and gold?" Ruffian models have hardly any metallic areas on them, with the exception of some weaponry and shackles that they're modelled with to represent their "Put them in chains!" special rule. However, I'm an eternal optimist, so I decided not to curl up into a whimpering ball and get cracking instead. 

A "starter" Sharkey's Rogues Battle Company (i.e. the bare minimum number of models you need to start out with) consists of the following:

3 Ruffians

1 Ruffian with Whip

2 Ruffians with bow

3 Wildmen

Again, I'd never painted Wildmen of Dunland before, so this would still be a fun challenge. 

The first model I chose to tackle I decided would become the leader of my company. Fortunately, Ruffians and Wildmen have some pretty unique poses, so there would be plenty of individuality in my Battle Company. One of the Ruffians comes with a club, but also has a bow slung across his back – he's also a bit bulkier than the others, so I decided he'd be the perfect leader. 

So, how to do my chosen colour scheme? I decided I didn’t want the gold to be too bright, as Ruffians wouldn’t be bright and shiny. I experimented with a few ideas, before settling on a drybrush of Retributor Armour over a basecoat of Rhinox Hide – this gave me a muted gold colour that I thought worked really well. The green was much easier to do – I started with Death Korps Drab, washed it with Agrax Earthshade and then highlighted it with Castellan Green and Loren Forest.

For my leader, I chose gold trousers and overcoat, with green for the tunic, so the colours complimented each other really well. I chose Steel Legion Drab for the underclothing as it contrasted nicely with the green and gold – my leader was coming along nicely!

Wildmen are slightly trickier as they have even less metallics than the Ruffians. However, they do have fur! A quick drybrush later, my first Wildman had gold fur, which paired nicely with the green cloth I gave him!

With the rest of the fine details picked out, I had my first two models! Now they just needed names. For inspiration, I looked back through the names of Breelanders that appear in Fellowship of the Rings, as well as the newer Ruffian heroes that come in the Scouring of the Shire sourcebook. They tend to have "tree" names (Rowan, Briarthorn, Ferny, etc.), so that was my basis – I then christened my leader Griff Oakwood. Dunlendings however tend to have more Nordic names – I ended up choosing the name Thorgun for my first Wildman.

With these two done and my colour scheme settled, I moved onto painting and naming the rest of the company. For the other models, I decided to mix up the colours – for some, I chose to go with gold overshirts and green trousers, which came out really well – the gold stands out but isn’t too bright. I now had three more members for my company – Rob Pickett (Ruffian with whip), Tom Greyfeather (Ruffian with Bow 1) and Bob Hatchett (Ruffian 2)

For the other Ruffians, I did the opposite – green overshirts with gold trousers, which tied the army together nicely whilst maintaining the individualism – my new members were Grag Thatcher and William Broadash

That just left the last two members, which were the remaining Wildmen. And with plenty of time left before the deadline, all it took was a lick of paint and Sighur (sword) and Naghar (spear) were ready to join the company!

And now, here's the full company in all its glory! I decided that they also needed a name, and given they're Sharkey's men, I decided on the Lockhole Gang. 

This project went from an intimidating challenge to really fun surprisingly quickly – once I'd got the colours worked out and how best to apply them to the models, painting the company became really enjoyable. 

It helps too that the Ruffians and Wildmen are lovely models, covered in fun little details that add to their overall look. My company's looking forward to taking to the tabletop and seeing what they can do!

I hope you've enjoyed reading about the challenge and how I tackled the models and colour scheme I was assigned. A huge thanks to everyone involved for helping out with motivation and inspiration – big thanks also to Dewi for arranging and organising the whole thing.

Please check out the other Battle Companies put together by the other hobbyists who took part in this challenge – links to all of them are set out below, and I think you'll be amazed by what some of the people in this challenge have created! Until next time, happy hobbying!

Dewi Evans - Guardians of Wiltshire - https://youtube.com/c/GuardiansofWiltshire 

Steve Crowe - Top Table Gaming - https://www.youtube.com/c/TopTableWargaming 

Rob Conroy-Máigheóc - Over the Edge of the Wild - https://edgeofthewildsbg.blogspot.com 

Cameron Cochrane - PaintsOnA4Up - https://www.youtube.com/c/PaintsOnA4Up 

Dan Slobodian/Steve Thorley/Colm Browne/David Cooper/Dan Stuart - Drawn Combat - https://drawncombat.blogspot.com 

Dene Palmer - Dene Paints Things -

https://youtube.com/c/Denepaintsthings 

https://www.instagram.com/denepaintsthings/ 

Damian O'Byrne - Battle Streams in Middle-earth - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDeTFeeH7jOuwXxmU3aT-_Q 

Alex Temple - Battle Camper: https://youtu.be/hPDRGl0pMNE 

Benjamin Bowles - Benji’s Hobbies - https://youtube.com/c/Benji%E2%80%99sHobbies 

Harry Parkhill - Battle Games in Middle-earth Battle Games in Middle Earth - YouTube & Entmoot https://soundcloud.com/entmootpodcast