Shepherd of the Forest

This is a rather special Ent. After building the plastic kit I had a head and a couple of right hands left. That's obviously the basis of another Ent but how to make the rest of it?

Basically, every time we went for a walk over the year, I collected some sticks. Always deadfalls - after all, Treebeard would not approve of me cutting  healthy trees down. 

Walks in Yorkshire, Wales, the highlands of Scotland - every part of  the countryside of mainland Britain contributed some elements. 

Then it was a matter of construction. Some drilling and pinning and a lot of Gorilla Gel.

I added a couple of branches from Dryads to break up the outline.

Almost by accident it appears that I made an Ent with attitude. Just looking at him you can hear the Beegees.

I then fastened him to the base and green stuffed the root structure round the feet.

I painted him using the one of the greatest strengths of contrast paints, I think - the ability to easily blend them to get natural colours. 

The leaves were painted in the traditional way and then I added some foliage from my stash.  

And so here is the current army of Fangorn Forest. 

Very happy with this one and obviously it has a lot of sentimental meaning to the family as it represents our travels in the countryside - something I think Professor Tolkien would have approved of. 

March of the Ents

To go with my Treebread, I decided to get another Ent. This one built for my wife as the Ents are here favourite bit of Middle Earth. Given that she's a redhead, there was really only one colour scheme I could go for...

Interestingly, there's a spare head and two spare arms in the kit. I reckon I could use the same method I use for making trees to make a third ent, which is more or less a 500 point army for Middle Earth....

A Thing Which Has Not Happened For An Age

" 'I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.' "

"They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. [...] But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards, Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them. 

   'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface were sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.' "

One of the most wonderful surprises I got for Christmas was an original metal Treebeard. I started work on it almost immediately.

Sticking it together was the usual pain, requiring a lot of pinning and a Heath Robinson construction to prop it up while the glue dried.

Then came the greenstuffing. Oh, so much greenstuffing. Still, at least sculpting the bark is easier than sculpting scales.

Painting was largely drybrushing and washes to build up slightly different wood tones.

The biggest decision I came to was to leave off the sculpted leaves and replace them with model foliage to give a more realistic finish. I think this was definitely the right choice, especially when I added some leaf scatter in some places.