The Fellowship of the Ring

At the beginning of last year I began a little side project to create for my Dad a little diorama. My Dad is a big fan of the Fellowship of the Ring movie and of the first Hobbit movie. I would have liked to paint all of the 13 dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf since the Hobbit movie had just come out at the time. However getting hold of some good figures of all of the characters from Games Workshop would have been really pricey and probably  would have taken more time than I had to do the project. As such I chose to go with the Finecast Fellowship of the Ring set. I also ended up purchasing the terrain set that GW provides for their Lord of the Rings line.

Each one of these figures is a resin miniature and were thankfully designed in such a way that each figure was one piece. This was a really nice feature as sometimes dealing with multi-part metal or resin miniatures is a royal pain. I will also give GW a lot of credit on the formula that is used for the resin in their miniatures. This resin has a really good blend of stiffness and flexibility, although I did push this to the max at one point and caused myself a bit of consternation.

In painting these figures this was the first time I had ever worked in the realm of the Lord of the Rings universe. I have been a HUGE long time fan of the universe as it is laid out in the books and I think that visually Peter Jackson and GW have done an excellent job of bringing Tolkien's vision into the real world. My praise for Peter Jackson stops there. I would go on a rant/tangent about what I think has been horribly screwed up and has made subsequent additions to the theatrical franchise a total and utter money seeking farce. But that is a post for anther day. Back on topic starting right now.  Since this was my first time painting these particular characters I spent a bit of time looking for pictures of the cast in their garb as they are represented by the miniatures. I even spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get certain looks from the paints I had on hand. The experiences I have gained from my other projects really came to the for in this project. I am by no means a pro competition grade painter. I am also not a 3 year old with hand paints either. Hear are the results.

Legolas

Aragorn

Boromir

Gimli

Gandalf

Pippin

Merry

Frodo

Sam

I still have some work to do. I have never done elves before and trying to get their fair and non-human look down right is a bit tricky. I also still need to work on the eyes of my miniatures. These ones are a far cry from the anime style bug eyes I had when I first started. But sometimes they come off wrong.

The display case was purchased from Squadron.com and is basically a converted vehicle display case. I did a little bit of terrain stuff, but I wanted to keep it fairly simple as the whole purpose of this was to show case the Fellowship. Not go crazy with the terrain. I also decided to do something rather radical for me at least. I went ahead and combined two different flock types to get what I consider to be a better color grass. Also the entire base is painted. I did not do any highlighting or dry brushing as the color of the terrain material that I used was grey and I did not go super heavy with the brown paint. I think the result gave me a decent look.

Final result. I think it I did a rather good job. Will I do this again in the future? Yes. This was a lot of fun to do. I have begun to find a lot of enjoyment in doing one off miniatures, as in spending a lot of time with a single miniature or a group of them as seen in my Sons of the Emperor project(Update on that soon). Not going full bore nuts like some of the competition people do. But being able to put more than a couple of hours into each figure and trying out different paint schemes. The added bonus is that since this was a gift I do not feel like I have purchased miniatures for no purpose other than to satisfy my vanity. There are a ton of miniatures out there that I would like to paint. But finding reasons to validate purchasing miniatures that will not be part of one of my bigger projects is difficult. Will there lots of updates on them? No. This was done as a gift for my Dad and as he watches my Blog I have no intention in giving away information on surprise gifts. Will there be more of these coming along each year. Due to other projects, that thing called college, and that thing called life I believe that I will only be doing one of these a year. I already have a head full of ideas on what to do next. It is just a matter of money and time at this point. Also some of the projects take a little bit of thinking to figure out how to do it right.