Radagast the Brown

"Radagast is, of course, a worthy wizard, a master of shapes and changes of hue; and he has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends."

-Gandalf the Grey, Fellowship of the Ring

"I don't understand why it's not working! It's not as if it's witchcraft! .... Oh, but it is. A dark and terrible magic..."

-Radagast, An Unexpected Journey

This was a little treat to myself a few months ago; a treat for two reasons. First because I wanted to complete my set of Middle Earth wizards and secondly because Sylvester McCoy is one of my favourite Doctors, so the chance to have a 28mm version of him was too good to pass up.

There's not a lot to say on this one, other than that I took one lesson from the Blanchitsu work I'd been doing -  a very light drybrush of white as the absolute final stage of painting . Here you can see it's helped bring out the detail of the cloak as well and slightly fading down all the colours and making the whole thing look lived in.

As an aside, we also had another game of Memoir 44. I occurs to me that all most people who've joined the blog have seen is the painting so you might not know where the title comes from.

These cards would be lovely if I had any troops in the centre at all.

There are five symbols on the dice. Would you like to guess what the symbol is that denotes a miss? Go on, have a guess. 

And that's where the title of the blog comes from.

Fifteen Years

Blimey Charlie! It's been 15 years since Fellowship of the Ring was released in the cinema.

As a quick glance at the tag cloud at the side there will attest, a lot of my painting over the last few years has taken place in Middle Earth. So just to contribute to the festivites here's a few of my LoTR models.

Not Another F***ing Elf

With the immortal words of Hugo Dyson, fellow Inkling, upon hearing Tolkien read a section from the Lord of the Rings in our ears, let us look at my latest paint job.

Legolas Greenleaf is another of the early sculpts from GW and he is lovely. A fabulous likeness of Mr Bloom.

Colour wise I used a reference shot from the film:

Base colours were easy to mix using, oddly enough, a very WW2 palette; olive drab, feldgrey and khaki were the main shades.

Hair was mixed from yellow and bone, highlighting up to yellow. I felt that was more fitting than the almost white of the films at 28mm scale.

The final touch was stringing the bow. Not something I've ever done before but ridiculously easy after rigging the Napoleonic ships.  This is certainly something I'll start doing with all archers from now on.

And finally just the base. I might add some leaves when I get some yellow rather than brown ones made. 

I don't really feel the urge to paint the hobbits; so I might get around to Boromir and Gimli to complete my truncated Fellowship.

What I really want to do is a Nazgul on Fellbeast but I can't really justify the cost. If I see a cheap one, though...

Edited to cite the correct Inkling! In the first version I'd wrongly attributed it to Lewis. 

"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....