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…

D&D Monster Manual 3 : Treeman/Treant – aka Reaper Bones 77184: Spirit of the Forest – Speedpaint!

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!

My "Proof" pic for TOR.

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