Workbench Update: Minas Tirith

Recently, I put up a post (two, really) on Minas Tirith armies that I liked that centered around Gandalf the White. Today, it's show and tell for Minas Tirith, with painting, basing, and conversions to show for all our work.

Painting

Not much to say here - pictures will show more below. I will note that in all my previous armies, I've adapted my painting scheme so that no two models were alike. If you have 48 Moria Goblin Warriors, for example, you could paint up all 48 to be exactly the same. From what I hear, this is a slog and a real psychological hurdle. For me, I do the following:

• 2 colors of Goblin skin: Green, Gray
• 3 colors of Goblin tunics: Red, Orange, Brown
• 2 styles of armor: Black (with metallic highlighting), Metallic
• 2 styles of weapons: Black (with metallic highlighting), Metallic
• 2 colors of sandals: Brown, Black

With this method, I can make a grid that has 48 total combinations, making all the Goblins look different (but keeping a united color pallet). Minas Tirith, however, works differently: all the Warriors of Minas Tirith will need to have the same brilliant metal shine and their weaponry will want to look uniform too. To accommodate this, I took a leaf out of my Uruk-Hai book, where I focused on highlighting details (hand prints - took a long time to do) on my models and adding blood/gore to some of their weapons. This still kept all the models looking unique while keeping a very uniform appearance. For Minas Tirith, I made small differences - gold hilts vs. black hilts, brown boots vs. black boots, and various different hair colors (brown, black, yellow, gray, white - a trick I did with my Dwarves too). Where I got stuck were the swords, because I decided to do brown spears/bows vs. black spears/bows - so I used a little plastic cutting and gluing to change the poses of the swords (which was easy, considering the wholesale changes I made to my Numenoreans a little while ago).



Basing

I've done several kinds of basing - flock/rocks, just paint, even some glue with grit. Today, we experiment with something new - FILLER! If you're not familiar with filler/spackle, I've used it in several posts here on the blog (most notably tree bases and my Dwarf hold board) and Centaur's used it too on several projects (most notably the hills he made for Brawler Bash). I've never used it for bases, but I thought it turned out rather well:

While I could have probably left them white and gone for the cobbled street look (like they were all in Minas Tirith), I'm opting for an Osgiliath appearance - going to paint them grey. The spackle I used was dried out, which makes it terrible for patching holes in your wall, but when you add a little water, the spackle comes back to life and can be spread easily (drying to again become as stiff as rock).

After the spackle dried (left for ~24 hrs), I then took some grey paint and watered it down so that the paint would seep into all the gaps without having to push with the brush (this made the spackle wet again, allowing for subtle changes, but not destroying the whole thing).

I did want a very Osgiliath feel to it, so I decided everyone was going to be either "on a street" or near a street, which led me to cobbling. I've done this with cardboard before, and I found spackle far easier to cut (but if you cut too close to the edge of a base, the spackle can flake off). With a thin blade, I was able to cut out grooves for the cobblestones on parts of the bases - models with legs close together made great choices for a fully cobbled base, while those with cloaks or feet spread apart would be more on the periphery (if they were on cobbled streets at all).

As I've done with many of my models, I then painted a ring around the base - blue for Minas Tirith mostly because I used to play them as blue in Battle for Middle-Earth (back in the day). Since blue is also not in their color pallet, it draws some attention to the model.

We finished off the work with a drybrushing of white paint on the road. I plan to add some sand (painted gray) for the non-road parts - we'll probably get to that when we do the banner conversion...

Converting Osgiliath Veterans

Converting Warriors of Minas Tirith to Osgiliath Veterans is easy: use putty to give them slings or bandages. I've seen some people even do head swaps with Corsairs of Umbar to get the lost helmet look - might do that if/when I get Corsairs. I mostly stuck to slings on shield-arms and bandages on wrists (though one guy got an eye injury and has a bandage around his head.

That's it for Minas Tirith for now. Our next workbench update takes us to Rivendell, where we'll be looking at equipment changes and hero conversions. Before that, however, we're revisiting a topic we covered years ago and updating it. Until next time, happy hobbying!