We’re starting the New Year with some Lord of the Rings models – the Villains of Eriador Figure pack from FFG’s Journeys in Middle-Earth game. Very much the same situation as with the recent Blood Rage Werewolf and Fenrir – I plucked the lucky box from my boardgame shelf while playing some Zombicide and decided that they would be the next “Easy Win” models. I’ve been a little tardy in getting new posts up – a combination of hot weather making the War Room too uncomfortable to play or photograph in and having headed back into the Gym for the first time since Covid forced a long break and then my broken knee extended that break – giving me essentially a bonus 4 months of lockdown! Not that I especially want to go anywhere besides to work and to the Gym/Pool, but hey…

As far Journeys in Middle-Earth goes, I’ve had this game for awhile now, but never even gotten around to opening it until working on these models. There aren’t that many models in the set, so maybe this will be a box I can get done in 2022 so we can play it with a set of fully-painted models.

Maybe.

The trio in this set feature a named Warg with a number of wounds leaping from Tactical Rock as well as an Armoured foe and an Orc. I painted the Armoured model, “Atarin” in much the same way as my Black Numenorians and Castellans of Dol Guldor. I fixed the image links for those posts the other day, and I’ve also now just noticed that I never took a full group shot of them all, apparently – so I’ll have to add that to my “to do” list.

The most involved of the three – but also the nicest sculpt turned out to be the Orc, “Gulgotar”. While I like my Games Workshop Orcs/Orks and am happy with the brighter, stronger green of their skin, I don’t find that it works so well for me on more realistically proportioned models. So for models representing Tolkien’s Orcs, or even D&D Orcs, I prefer more muted and otherwise naturalistic tones. In this case, I went for a greenish ochre tone – thanks to my WWII painting, I had Vallejo’s Middlestone on my painting desk, which worked perfectly as a base. I kept Gulgotar to muted, earthy tones and had a good time on him, trying out some new ways to do things and keeping the overall palette close. Lastly, the Warg, “Colfang”. It’s a pretty simple, slightly cartoony sculpt but it was pretty easy to paint. Since it’s a named model, I decided to go for a black furred scheme, and just picked out the skin around the eye wound and stained the fur around the arrows stuck in its side.

As I noted above, while I was working on these I decided to take a peek at the Core Box contents to see what was in there, and found a trio of Wargs. Since I was working on the named one anywaym these were an easy pick to get plucked and added to the queue. Rather than paint the three identical sculpts identically, I went for brown/grey/black – which I assume should also work when playing the game “get the brown wolf” etc. Also pretty simple sculpts, but they painted up quickly and came up pretty decent – especially for boardgame models!