Another group of Uruks. This time, they’re of the Mordor variety. I’ve got a ton of Isengard Uruk-Hai, bu only a small number of Mordor’s Black Uruks. I guess that’s what happens when one type is available in an affordable plastic kit while the other is only available in metal with a very limited number of sculpts (3!) for the first several years.
I’ve seen some nice work online on these sculpts featuring a lot of browns, but I wanted to keep my own Black Uruks more literal and stick with black-greys, just using brown as a weathering colour and for the spots of fur on a couple of the models. It also lets the weathered, slightly rusted metal of their armour pieces stand out a little more and not look like they’re also made of leather. Their flesh is painted simply, using a bluish shade of grey inspired by the films and also to help distinguish their skin from their wargear. I wanted their eyes to look particularly dark, so just a glint of white reflection on a black base, rather than the usual outline-whites-pupils thing that we do.
I only gave three of the models shields, which are an option in SBG. In games we’ll either consider them uniformly equipped with or without the shields or play WSIWYG. More important to me was to make the duplicated models a little more unique where possible – not always easy when dealing with multiples of metal sculpts. The Mordor shields of the eye are press–moulds of the shields from Citadel’s ME-44 Uruk-Hai models from their original Lord of the Rings range from the 1980’s. I painted the eye icons in the usual metallic way, then painted the red quite roughly on them, leaving some metal showing due to paint chips and indifferent paintwork by the Uruk troops.
Ten in total. One solid unit of Black Uruks for a Mordor force in Lord of the Rings games
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
Brilliant work. I especially love the shields – I still have some of those old ME-44 Uruk-Hai and it’s great to see bits of them being used today.
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Thanks James. I’m actually loath to paint them since I like having those shields available for future press-moulds should I ever need them again (for example, right now I have no idea where the moulds I used for these shields are…)
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Considering where they originate, that scheme seems very appropriate
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Yep, Black Uruks from Mordor wearing black!
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Nice job mate & good call to sprinkle in a few shields for variety
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Thanks Alex. The poses being so limited is a constant problem with the LotR range, so anything that works to make it less obvious needs to be done. Unfortunately with Black Uruls, you can’t just vary the clothing as you can with some others.
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The shields are great and your “black” work is always very impressive. They look fearsome man
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Thanks mate. They’re one of those units that had a period where they sucked to paint, but in the end they’ve worked out well.
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I can see you put a lot of work into these. In the pics though, the color of the faces look very similar to their clothes. I tried to zoom in, but no luck. I’m guessing they look even more impressive in person. The cloaks and everything definitely look great.
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Yeah, even when starting with slightly different base colours, the difficulty at this scale is that they are so close. Here’s a reference pic of what I’m trying to emulate:
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In your post following this one, I can see the differences better in the pics. I think it was just the size of the pics/lighting that was covering up the details. They look great! 😀
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No worries – their helmets probably make a difference as well, since it cuts down further on how much face-skin you can easily see.
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You achieved this! Nice!
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Thanks Mark! It took a bit of futzing around to work out how I’d try to do it, but I’m glad it worked.
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