"Aye, I Could Do That."

"I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with an Elf."

"What about side by side with a friend?"

"...Aye. I could do that."

Who doesn't love Gimli and Legolas? In an attempt to clear the decks before the Christmas loot arrives, I'm trying to tidy up some loose ends this week. Part of this was finishing off my little mini-fellowship. 

It actually turned out to be quite hard to find photo references for Gimli in his Fellowship outfit without the Elven cloak so I had to watch a couple of clips and take a best guess. 

In other Middle Earth news, I built up painted the last set of the Ruins of Osgiliath:

As I said in my previous post you simply cannot beat that for £40. The three sets easily create a setting for a 4x4 skirmish. Throw in some scatter and vegetation and you're done.

I am currently trying to resist the temptation to buy the Laketown House. The multipack is a touch more expensive, but you don't half get some scenery for your money. 

 As a final bit of housekeeping I based up the Dragon - the building of which is detailed exhaustively here - but when it was done, I found that that with dragon being green and the base also being earth tones, it needed something to make it pop.

Enter the snow effect I looked at earlier. 

As sort of scatter terrain, it breaks up with the green enough to do the job. There's still something missing here so I thick I'm going to have to come back to this one again.

And finally, you may recall that my Eldest son has adopted two orc warg riders as his favourite toys. So, as it's the season of goodwill, I've been keeping an eye on ebay.

12 second hand warg riders + 1 four-year boy = happiness:

So I guess I have those to paint up before Christmas. 

"I Kill Where I Wish"

"I kill where I wish and none dare resist. I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today. Then I was but young and tender. Now I am old and strong, strong strong."
― Smaug, The Hobbit

 No miniature collection is really complete until it has a dragon. I've attempted a couple before but lost interest before they were finished and came close with the rescue project on the Carnosaur. But this summer I rediscovered my mojo - Middle Earth Mojo, as it happens - and so I decided to finish off in a grand fashion.




This is the GW Middle Earth Dragon. It's been another of those on-off projects since before the kids were born.

Here's the final construction. As you can see there's the usual horrific gaps you get with large lead models. 

I'm quite happy with the gap filling on this one. As you can see, once undercoating the large ones on the haunches are more or less seamless. 

I also sculpted some new, shorter, blunter horns. The horns that came with the kit were quite long and I felt they spoilt the shape of the head - see here; I went with something that helped the bullish, squat look of the model.

I was also not a huge fan of the GW suggested colour scheme. Smaug was certainly red (with a jewel-encrusted underbelly) but the Lord of the Rings films tried to make everything look very natural. So I wanted a colour scheme with a certain level of verisimilitude. Luckily, Tolkien himself sketched what he though a dragon of his Middle Earth should look like:

So with the colour scheme set, time to crack out the airbrush. 

And here's the basecoats done

Then I started adding some dark glazes to shade:

And some lightter glazes to pick out specific scales

Then a red glaze to help with the fleshy, leatherly look of the wings and also to match the red of Tolkien's sketch. 

Red glaze in the mouth and Tamiya transparent red for the tongue. 

Final highlights on the skin

And then the horns and spines. 

And finished.

And a couple more shots with the good camera to let you see the colours more accurately. 

Overall a nice little project to finish the summer on. Next up... Not quite sure, actually. Stay Tuned....