So I’ve been browsing over at The One Ring forum again lately, and one of the cool things the community over there does is have a monthly little painting competition for LotR models. The January theme was “Monsters” but, you know, January is over – but I found the Feb theme of a unit of models to be a little off-putting (I’m better with individuals, generally – and especially with start-to-finish stuff). Then yesterday afternoon, a thought hit me – grab out an appropriate monster of some sort from the pile of unpainted Reaper Bones figures I have from the Kickstarter, and speedpaint it as a personal challenge. I knew that it wouldn’t be winning the TOR comp, but if I managed to finish it, I’d have a pretty cool prize anyway – a decently tabletop standard finished model for wargaming – KoW being the current hotness (even though I have a couple of completed Ents anyway.)

So I took a look through, disregarded several dragons since it was already 6pm on the 30th of Jan and heat-straightening dragons wasn’t something I felt like doing, and eventually found this guy – Good enough for an Ent or Huorn!

Basecoating with Citadel Mournfang Brown Base.

Glued Down.

It turned out to not be a fun easy mini to paint, but pretty horrible, with ill-defined “what the hell is that supposed to be?” “details” all over it. It’s not going to win any prizes – over on TOR or anywhere else, but I was at least on track at the end of the first night for a half-decent tabletop model by the end bell.

Paint finished. Just needing the base and foliage.

I considered OSL for the eyes, but decided against it. I wanted to keep it a little more subtle for this model. I went with green Entish eyes over red Huornish ones.

Finished!

Here we go. I’m just happy I managed to get this guy done in about 28 hours from baggie to finished – and most of that being drying time from washes, inks, glue and varnish. Thanks to this comp, I now have another model for the table, and since I can be as slow as all hell to paint, this is a very good thing.

In the end I ended up going over a lot of the sculpted (and painted) details, since these details were so soft and often ill-defined. Things like the inner-joint areas of the model just being putty that was dotted for “detail”. I’ll take the static grass look instead!

Fisty!

Baby Got Back???

No more photos Left! Geddit? Left! /sigh