It's been a while since my last blog post, for a variety of reasons, chief of which has been things being somewhat busy in real life, the scourge of any hobby-related activity!
Fortunately, I've still been productive and have continued my slog through the pile of unpainted plastic, metal and resin that forms my pile of shame. Fortunately, I've both had and have a number of tournaments on the horizon, perfect motivation for getting some paint on models.
But getting back to one of the topics for this post – the problem with painting queues. When you have a large collection of unpainted miniatures like I have, one of the problems you will often encounter is trying to decide exactly which models to paint. And my painting queue doesn’t just contain models from the Middle Earth SBG – it's got models from other game systems in it too.
As mentioned in my burnout post however, tackling models from another system can be a good way of avoiding painting fatigue, and are also a good way of trying out certain techniques, especially if the model is a larger scale than SBG – for example, I painted up some models from the Star Wars Legion miniatures game, which being in a slightly larger scale help you work on your highlighting skills – being larger, they may need an extra highlight that could be left off an SBG miniature – these Rebel Troopers and Luke Skywalker ended up looking great.
As I’ve often said on this blog, tournaments can also be a good way of selecting which models to paint – for example, I recently attended the Middle Earth Team Championships at Warhammer World, and agreed to take the new Assault on Lothlorien Legendary Legion. Checking through what I needed against what I already had painted, I realised I only needed to paint three models – Muzghur, leader of the legion, an orc captain and an orc banner bearer – a nice and easy set of models to work my way through. The orc captain model I worked on comes in a blister with another captain, so I painted both at the same time – one to take part in the assault, and the other to lead my orcs on the Pelennor Fields.
For the banner, I decided to have a go at some freehand, reasoning that with it being an orc banner, I wouldn’t have to worry too much about neatness – I daubed a red eye of Sauron on the banner, tidied up a few edges that I thought were too rough, and I had a banner for the legion!
With that done, I had two more events to look forward to in October – Lord of the Imps, a 900 point tournament in Lincoln, and The Battle of Unnumbered Tears, a 1000 point event held up in Sutton-in Ashfield, near Nottingham.
I couldn’t realistically paint up 1,900 points worth of models for both events (maybe for another event in the far future, but not when they're within two weeks of each other!), so I decided to stick with the same army for both events. I've played around with various forces of good that would have fought together on the Pelennor Fields for several events in the past, so this time I decided to focus on the evil side of things for a change – a host of orcs and Easterlings! The problem? I didn’t have anywhere near enough models painted, and only had around a month to get through them all.
Fortunately, a solution was at hand – batch painting. A straightforward technique where you paint a stage of your paint job on every single model, one by one. So, for example, you paint all the metal areas, then all the cloth areas, then the skin, and so on until they're all finished. To save time with the Morannon Orcs, I also used a coloured spray primer (GW Leadbelcher in this case) to speed things up even more – after a wash and a drybrush, all the metallic areas were done.
I also stuck to a limited colour pallet of reds and browns for all the cloth areas, adding a little bit of variety to the skintones – by using these simple techniques, I bashed out over 30 Morannons, several captains, a banner bearer and Gothmog in a little over two weeks! Gothmog got a little bit of extra attention (being a hero, I wanted him to stand out a bit more) – fortunately his different skintone and extra details make it easier to make him stand out.
To break up the monotony of batch painting, I turned my attention to the leader of my forces – The Witch-King of Angmar! This was a really easy model to paint up, and by just taking time and picking out all the highlights carefully, he was ready to lead Mordor's armies into battle!
Next up was Amdur, Lord of Blades and his Easterlings. Again, I did things in stages, focusing on the gold and red parts first (these being the most prominent parts of the models), before picking out the smaller details such as the black cloth and skin. The new red GW paints came in very handy here, as I was able to create different shades for the different cloths on the model, giving Amdur different coloured robes and cloak, adding that little bit of extra depth to the model. I have always believed it's worth doing a little bit of extra work on a hero model, as it really helps them stand out from the regular rank and file troops.
So, with all these models now painted, my total number of models painted for the year has now passed over 200 models! As mentioned before, there is still a way to go in terms of getting everything in the backlog painted, but I like to think I've passed a huge milestone psychologically by getting 200 models done in a single year, and that of course only goes up to the end of September – there's still three months left to get through some more models!
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