Fellowship...

Before things crank up again with the next article for the Ancible, not to mention the Tale of 3 Painters, I thought I'd sneak in something I've been working on for a bit.  A long time ago my wife asked me to paint the Fellowship of the Ring for her mother.  This has been a long old project - the miniatures are fantastic (as is 99% of stuff related to Tolkein), but I often find GW's LotR range difficult to paint.  I also wanted to match the colours of the outfits in the movie as closely as I possibly could.

Unfortunately, because of how long this project took, I can't remember how I did half of this stuff...

These were painted exclusively with GW's previous range of paints, and I think you could pretty much call out the paints I used on each of them (especially if you had the time to go back through my previous posts).  They show up a little shinier in the pictures than I'd hoped for, but they are pretty matte in "real life"

The tall chaps (not including Gimli who would be better off with the hobbits), are all fairly recent, and I've started to use some of the new range of GW paints, Dryad Bark has come in particularly useful.  I couldn't let go of Charadon Granite for this project though, and it's the base for Aragorn and Legolas.

Last but not least is Gandalf the Grey:

He comes across a little blue in the pictures, but not so much in "real life".  In the films there is a blue tint to his robes and hat, and I did attempt to recreate that.  He is in fact, my third attempt at Gandalf, after the previous metal piece, and the plastic version that came with the LotR boxed set - this one is definitely my best attempt though.

One of the best things about painting miniatures as presents for people is seeing their reaction when they receive them.  My mother-in-law loves them, so I've earned some significant brownie points with the family, and it made me feel good too.  :-)

In other news, I found a solution for the white background issue I mentioned in a previous post:

http://pakcreative.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/remove-white-text-background-in-blogger.html

...so that should do the trick.

I also received a small box in the post this morning - once I'd let the sniffer dog give it the once over and run it through the scanner (just kidding mate), I opened it to find the Watcher and Hoffman ready for the Tale of 3 Painters project from The Dark Templar.  So all things going well I'll get these bad boys started at the weekend!

As always, comments and criticism welcome!