Gandalf the Grey – Speedpaint

Citadel Miniatures, Gandalf the Grey.

When I’m able to focus, and manage to remember, I like to participate in the odd painting challenge over at The One Ring webpage, which is a great community of Tolkien/Miniatures gaming enthusiasts. Sometimes I check their page too late, sometimes I forget for months at a time, sometimes I select a figure but just don’t finish (or start!), and sometimes I actually manage to finish the model on time. Recently, I actually managed the latter, so I’m sharing it now.

Citadel Miniatures, Gandalf the Grey.

This Gandalf is from one of the very early boxed sets, circa around 2000. I bought it back in the day, and haven’t exactly been quick when it comes to painting it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve completed any of them. Well, excepting Gandalf now. I never got around to really playing the game in any meaningful way, so most of my interaction with the LotR line has consisted of collecting them.

I’m quite happy with the outcome, especially since the model was also a speedpaint, and something a bit left field – since I wasn’t planning to paint any Fellowship-type models at the moment. I managed to get this guy done in just a bit over 24 hours from start to finish (though he was already primed black, from god knows how long ago). I rarely manage to do it, but there’s something especially rewarding about finishing a figure in a day. Or in this case, 2 days. Regardless, a lot nicer than my usual, which is months or even years to finish figures.

My previous attempt to paint a Gandalf model petered out and the model hasn’t been touched since 2010, as documented by the link…

Warzone Resin Scenery and some other Scenery.

No, not the new/current incanation of WarZone by Prodos Games, but 1st/2nd Edition Era stuff. These pieces came out in the same kind of retail blisters that almost all of the Scotia Grendel stuff that I’ve been showing off recently, so I think it’s likely that Grendel made them under licence from Target Games/Heartbreaker, back in the day. These all sat in various containers and boxes for a good decade and a half until recently, towards the end of last year when I pulled them out and decided to paint them, and practice some new techniques.

Entranceway

I did a lot of playing around with Verdigris effects on these. Pretty much figuring out how to do it. I missed that little Dark Legion icon up top of this archway until I was looking at these photos. Maybe I’ll go back and paint it with gold/brass/verdigris.

Inside(?) of the archway. Surely not the outside?

Obviously, I used a lot of drybrushing on these sets as well. I almost always use it on stone, but I usually hand paint and shade things like skulls. In this case, however, they got drybrushed as well, and the starkness actually turned out really well, I think.

Long walls

I also had a bit of a play with weathering powders and Tamiya’s weathering compacts on the bottom of these scenery elements. The compacts worked a lot better than the powders, especially as the scenery needed to be varnished and will be handled a lot.

Short walls

I basically bought one of each set. In retrospect, maybe I should have bought some extra walls and corners, but then, I didn’t have unlimited funds back then, and we tended to spread stuff like this out a bit to use as ruins to fight on and around in 40k and WarZone.

Concave walls

I also had a bit of a play with some MIG rust washes on the metal parts of the wall reinforcements. Not bad, but probably better used elsewhere, or more carefully, as using it in these places became tedious and didn’t allow for the best effect of the realistic rust effects. Well, it could have, if I didn’t have to do so many of them. Looking at the pics I can see small areas I could have focused on to enhance the rust effects, but hindsight, eh?

Convex walls.

I quite like the utility of scenery elements like this. Pretty much everything I bought as scenery back in the day was done so with at least one eye towards using it for 40k. Even scenery that is nominally for Fantasy and other games – The farmhouse seen a couple of posts ago has spent more time on 40k tables than fantasy ones!

Dark Legion/Chaos Throne

Since – let’s face it – this scenery is going to spend more time on Warhammer-game-themed tables than Warzone tables, I looked around for awhile for something appropriate for the banners. Originally, I was just going to paint some runes of Khorne on them, but that seemed a bit too boring. These stars appear to be used by the “Blood Pact” Renegade Guard forces from one of the IA books, but also look generic enough to be more general Chaos than just Khornate. Turned out better than I’d expected, too!

Outer-wall side of the throne piece.

Subtle? Dark Legion? Chaos? Naaaaa!

All of the pieces

Here’s all of the pieces assembled together. You can see why I’d have bought some more walls and corners pretty well here, but in practical use, these pieces will be combined with other resin and stuff, ruined walls and so forth. It will work equally well as scenery for 40k and other sci-fi games (WarZone, maybe?) as well as Fantasy games such as Kings of War, Mordheim SoBH, etc. It’s all pretty Pathfinder/RPG friendly as well.

Stone Stairs

This Spiral Staircase can be useful as a connection piece to higher-up scenery (Fortress Walls, etc) but is also useful for Pathfinder and Role-playing. It’s amazing to be just how much of this stuff is still available!

Staircase details

Some nice little hidden details on the underside of the staircase.

Porticullus

This piece is more useful as a Role-playing element than a tabletop wargame one, in my opinion. I had a play with the new Army Painter coloured washes on the runes above the grate. I could have gone nuts with glowy effects and OSL, but that was a bit too much for something that will be used as a mundane piece of dungeon terrain most of the time. Still available from Grendel.

Sewer grate

I really like this Sewer grate. It had a couple of the oversized skulls that I wasn’t fond of, but my clippers took care of that (one skull went flying through the lounge room and has still not been found!) My big plan for this piece is to use it when playing Helms Deep in LotR SBG or WotR – or Helms Deep-inspired scenarios for Kings of War. Butt it against a castle wall and let those Uruk-Hai sappers loose! Once again, Grendel are still selling this – in a three-pack this time, along with two pieces I painted and showcased awhile back. (about halfway down the page).

Damn, Grendel should be sending me some freebies when you consider the amount of their stuff I’ve been showcasing lately! This is pretty much all stuff I bought years and years ago, during my personal golden era of FLGS gaming in Melbourne, around 1995-2002 – and in most cases never got around to painting until now.