Dwarf Parade

   Great news for me. The blog reached 5000 pageviews a couple of days ago. For this reason I would like to thank each one of you who spent time and visited it. It is very supportive for me to continue the effort.

   The other day I counted all my Dwarves and they are 136 miniatures in total. I took a few photos of the whole army and also a photo of my recent six Iron Guards WIP. I decided to paint them with blue colours like Ancients. These six will be the last of my Dwarves. I have already an idea how to display them but I will speak about it in a future post. Here are the  photos: 

Dwarf Parade

A panoramic view of the army

Another view (not so different from the first actually)

And "The last of the Dwarves"

Flying Eagles

   Do you remember the post about Gwaihir (aka Gwaihir the Windlord), the greatest of the Great Eagles? A friend bought two of that miniatures, cut the woods and put them on flying bases. They look nice and you have the feeling that they are flying.

   Finally, I would like to welcome James who joined our company.

   That's it for today. Stay tuned for more!

Orc Captain "The Widowmaker"

   A friend of mine gave me this strange Orc figure some time ago. I didn't really know what to do with it until one day when I had an idea. The position of his body is perfect to depict an enemy's decapitation. The unlucky victim is a Minas Tirith Warrior, whom I gave a Corsair head for two reasons. First, he has his mouth open as if he is trying to scream from fear. And second, he hasn't a helmet, so it is easy for the Orc Captain to pull him by his long hair! The final scene has a lot of tension. Of course it is violent but that was the target to reenact the tremendous moment of the battle. I wanted also to show Orc Captain's complete prevalence over his opponent. That's why I called him "The Widowmaker". Now I have to use greenstuff to fix all the details and to paint them as well!

   I visited also my friend today and I took a couple of photos of the converted Beregond and the Galadhrim Banner Bearer. Here are the ready miniatures. He painted them really nice as you can see by yourselves.



      That's it for today. Stay tuned for the progress of "The Widowmaker"!

Kettledrums

   When "War of the Ring" was released on April 4th, 2009 lack of drummers and hornblowers made me to convert some figures to dress the lines of my armies with such warriors.  The question was "What I will use to make a drum?", a kettledrum to be exact. The answer was simple and cheap: a cover of a pen! Here some photos of ready, as well as WIP models. The "drum skin" is aluminium foil.

Warg Rider Drummer WIP

A common pen

The cover (The red line shows where it has to be cut) 

A target Kettledrum

Dunlending Drummer

The cover-drum and aluminium-skin

Morannon Drummer WIP

Uruk-hai Scout Drummer



   That's it for today. Enjoy!

Mordor vs Gondor

   A few weeks ago we played a simple, fast and fun game. Each player had an army of 1000 points, with which he had to hold two of the three objectives, or even better, all three of them, if it was possible. The objectives were the three red bright stones, you can see them forming a triangle in the middle of the table. We had a limit of turns to play, which were eight if I remember well. When the eighth turn was over, we had to count the objectives that we possessed. Who had the more was the winner.

   I thought that it would be a piece of cake for my Mordor army accompanied with their allies, the Easterlings, to defeat the Gondor's warriors. Unfortunately, that was not true. Each one of us managed to occupy a red stone easily, but when we started to fight for the third one, the terrain was proved a disadvantage for me because I could not move the mass of my army as I had planned. So, I lost precious time to make my move and to surround them. Below you can see the three red stones. The one in the blue circle I considered lost from the beginning. The left one I occupied easily. But for the right one my army had to fight hard. The red arrows show the moves I was planning to do.

   When finally I succeeded, completed my move and surrounded my enemies, the game was over and I lost! Anyway it was a fun to control heroes such as Shagrat, Shadow Lord, etc. and next time I hope Mordor will be victorious!     

 The terrain of the battle. Evil force is on the right. 

Gondor's forces

 Mordor's forces

 

The battlefield from the side of the good forces

  

The fight for the left red stone

The fight for the middle red stone

The trial to flank the enemy

   That's it for today. In a future post I will show you my Black Numenoreans that are ready now.  Enjoy! 

Orc Scythed Chariots

   Finally, the Orc Scythed Chariots are ready to participate in battles! During these battles I will use the Khandish chariots rules due to the lack of rules for Orc chariots. Or even better, we will write our own house rules with my friend, which rules I promise to post at first chance. By the way, only the Warhammer Orcs are lucky to have chariots, the orc boar chariots. Maybe their cousins, the Orcs of LotR, are too brainless to construct a chariot!

   A few words about the chariots now: they are made of balsa wood, I painted them with Vallejo Cork Brown and then washed with GW Devlan Mud. The scythes are Uruk-hai pike heads. The Orcs are a mix of various miniatures as I already explained in a previous post. I added some Warriors of Minas Tirith gear to the bases to give a sense of catastrophe. Especially the helmet, it is my favorite! Here are the photos:

   That's it for today. Enjoy!

Orc Chariots WIP 2

   What is the progress of the Orc Chariots so far? I managed to replace the hard-paper bases with the original GW ones, finished the painting of the chariots and almost finished the painting of the Charioteers. Here are the photos:  

   That's it for the moment. Stay tuned for the third and last post of this project! 

Orc Chariots WIP

  

 I think in one of my previous posts I explained how much I like chariots. Some time ago I decided to make two Orc Chariots. One with a single charioteer who would be the captain of the formation and another one with two Orc warriors as a crew. Recently, I bought two GW 60mm bases and I plan to transfer the wargs and chariots from the bases you see, which I made of hard paper, to the new original ones.

 

   The three charioteers are a mix of various miniatures such as Warriors of Minas Tirith, Orc warriors, Warg riders, corsairs and Uruk-hai. The chariots are made of balsa wood.

   That's it for today. Stay tuned for the next step of the Orc Chariots project.