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.

Worst feeling ever

So I have come to the conclusion that the worst feeling a hobbyist can ever have is as follows. I am currently at work wanting to paint some miniatures. IF that was not bad enough, the miniatures that I want to paint are 77 miles away at my parents house. Smooth move. Real smooth. Chances of going to my parents house between now and March.... wait for it..... wait for it...... ZERO PERCENT!  This would happen just when I got back to my apartment.

More French Cavalry

Quick update as promised for my 6mm Napoleonics. I am now down to only two more units of French Cavalry to paint (squeals of utter delight ringing in my head at the moment). These are two regiments of Hussars. The 1st and 4th Regiments of Hussars. They form part of the French I Cavalry Corps.

1st Hussars

4th Hussars

After these next two Regiments of Chassuers are painted up I will be moving on to a small amount of French Artillery and limbers. This of course includes any continued work on my Epic 40k miniatures.

Slogging on

It has been a while since I did a post and I apologize for that. The lack of posts has not been due to a lack of work, it is more due to a choice really. That choice being that I can either post a lot of tiny little blurbs on what I am doing or just do a single big post on all that has been happening. And with my school schedule the latter becomes easier.

Sooooo what have I been doing. Despite what the following pictures show, I have been doing a lot. I'll start with terrain. As I noted in a previous post I had decided to go back a redo a lot of the pathetic excuses that I had for terrain and so far so good. I have successfully made a lot of (still want more) wooden zig-zag fences as well as starting  to get under way with producing stone walls. I improved my hedges and even did a test tree stand which I will produce more of when I am done making fences and stone walls. I still have a way to go on getting all the fences done though as I need to spray paint all of them, but I lack the facilities to do that at my apartment sadly. So when I go home in July for a week I will be doing a lot of preparatory work to enable me to continue working on the terrain and miniatures.

A look at what I have been doing.

Next up is a 6mm Napoleonic update. I just finished three more regiments of Dragoons and used two of the regiments to finish off another French Cavalry Division. I realize now that I made one tiny little (more like really big) mistake in the way I ordered all of my 6mm Napoleonic figures. I bought a tone of French Cavalry. I mean a tone of it. I will have 43 French Cavalry regiments by the time I am done painting just what I own currently. What is even more ironic is that I have gotten really good at painting French Dragoons as they make up the majority of the French Cavalry arm( I have painted 15 regiments of the 30 I have info on). But the end is in sight.... kind of. All that is left is 1 regiment of Lancers, 2 regiments of Hussars, and 2 regiments of Chasseurs.

The French 7th Cav Division.

The 6th Dragoons.

The 16th Dragoons.

The 2nd Dragoons.

After I finish all of these French Cavalry regiments I will be onto more French Artillery and finally (almost a year after I had planned to start them) onto the Russians.

Lastly I am really excited as I get closer to finally making an order for 6mm American Civil War Miniatures. I plan on doing this some time next month and it will be a kind of kick starter on this project. I plan of focusing on the Eastern theater of the war and will be starting with armies based on the Gettysburg Order of Battle. The first major units I will be building will be the I Corps under John Reynolds and two of A.P. Hill's three divisions, plus John Buford's two Cavalry brigades that were at Gettysburg( His third one was else where). As you can see this will be a Gettysburg day one starter and from there I will develop the armies so that I can do anything before Gettysburg and after Gettysburg. With this new project there are going to be some changes from the Napoleonic 6mm project as I want to make this project distinct as there are a lot of difference between the two periods in terms of army organization. I'll talk more about that later. So stay tuned for more updates.

French II and IV Cavalry Corps

Today marks the completion of another major part of the French army. I have completed two of the main Cavalry Corps that I have planned for the French army. These are the II and IV Cavalry Corps as the title of this post gives away. Both Corps have a structure of two divisions and two horse artillery batteries, making for a total of 16 regiments and 4 horse artillery batteries. The II Corps is comprised entirely of Dragoon regiments while the IV is comprised of Curisasser regiments. These two Corps comprise most of the Medium and Heavy Cavalry that I have planned with only the III Cavalry Corps containing the second largest heavy cavalry formation. There will also be small smatterings of medium Calvary around the army but not as large as the II Cav Corps. Though these other cavalry formation will not get any work done on them for a while. There will be some work on the I Cavalry Corps, but it is a mixed medium and light Corps. I have some other Allied and maybe another French Corps that may contain more heavies, but for right now this is it.

French II Corps

French IV Corps

Work still continues as I write this. Currently I am working on clearing out the last of the prepared French Cavalry and Artillery so that I can launch myself into  Russian army additions. I am also anticipating the new Baccus 6mm French Napoleonic sculpts that are on the way. I am really interested to see what they all look like and I fervently hope that the holes in the product line are filled.

In other news I am beginning to work on revamping my terrain as my cheap method kinda.... well.... looks cheap. That means that I have finally found some ideas for trees, roads, rivers, difficult terrain, fences,  and crop fields that are easy to do and look rather good. So hopfully by the time I show another battlefield layout the miniatures will have a suitable field to fight on. I still need to figure out hills though and I have decided that bridges and buildings will just have to be bought and painted.

And finally I have reached the conclusion to permanently stall any major 28mm projects as well as my 6mm Warhammer 40K project. Both on the account that the returns for trying to work on such projects are too little with how much time I have available and the cost is not currently worth the results from my efforts. Therefore 6mm Napoleonics and painting individual 28 -54mm figures as well as some plans for a 6mm American Civil War project(Baccus miniatures of course) that will start with a focus on Gettysburg and should go all the way to an  army range that covers the start of the war to Appomattox. This is still in the planning stage and no miniatures will be bought for a while but that is the current plan. All I have down is a basing system and an order for more bases and basing materials. Flags will be next then a kick start into the range will be the final go ahead for that project.