Saruman

I can't host an, albeit intermittent, Lord of the Rings blog and not note the passing of Christopher Lee who, of course, was the only LotR cast member who had actually met Tolkein.  My effort at the Games Workshop Saruman (above) was one of the first (if not the first) metal Lord of the Rings figures I painted.

The Saruman figure came with Battle Games in Middle Earth issue 15 in 2002 and I painted it immediately, so before my blogs existed.   I am old enough to remember Christopher Lee as an actor in Hammer films Dracula series (and others) and, as an unlikely Chinese, in Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu films in the sixties.  So it is in these films, rather than his later Star Wars and LotR incarnations, with which I really identify him.

For me his appearance in The Lord of a Rings films was a surprise given his age at the time but now it is hard to imagine anyone else bringing Saruman to life.  

The Champions of Erebor

Others have commented on the outrageous price of these new Battle of Five Armies figures from Games Workshop: £118 in the UK and the fact that buying them in one lot like this gives no saving on buying the five individual packs they come in.  

What it says to me, however, is that there are going to be no big battle plastics for the film, just horrifically expensive Finecast figures for even basic troop types.  A lost opportunity! 

Goblin Town in Games Workshop Edinburgh

I was very impressed by this Goblin Town diorama in the window of Edinburgh's Games Workshop on the Royal Mile, when visiting there last week.

I shudder to think how many sets it took to create this piece!

It's certainly a board that looks the part although they admitted it was a diorama rather than a playable model.  It's probably too delicate for actual games.  Very inspirational, though!

The Battle of the Five Armies

 So, we have our first glimpse of the battle of the Five Armies and it has, as you would expect lots of Orcs who are, also as expected, not as disciplined in traversing the ground as Uruk Hai.

There are also, as you would expect, armoured Elf archers.

However, what I wasn't expecting was what looks like armoured dwarf cavalry riding armoured ibexes!  Dwarf cavalry?  Riding mountain goats?  Surely not?  The big question is, how many of these troop types will actually appear as Games Workshop figures or will they just produce a few characters at £25 a time?  

One thing I suspect will be released is this enormous chariot!

The trailer is here.

Mirkwood Rangers Part 1

Having finished the box of Warriors of Erebor I have rashly taken on another box of plastics for The Hobbit.  My daughter (it's her first pole dancing class tonight!) got me the Mirkwood Rangers for Christmas as a total surprise and she keeps demanding to see a painted one so I'd better get some done!  They are now assembled and based, ready for undercoating.  These figures are, for want of a better term, very 3D, moving away from the typical two plane approach to nearly all model soldiers necessitated by the moulding process.  These are two or three part models with, usually, a separate part for the coat tails which when fixed on the back takes them out of the two plane approach into something more dynamic.  I didn't like them when I first saw them as I thought they were too animated but now I am coming around to their very different look and wonder if the Perry twins will employ what they learned in the design process for these on some of their plastic historicals.

Tauriel has a particularly impressively sculpted posterior which is, sadly, hidden under her coat tails

For my birthday, two weeks after Christmas, my daughter the gave me the plastic Tauriel figure.  She is a five part model and literally stands out from the other elves because she is standing on a tree branch.  Now I can't stand scenic items on bases like this but, again, when assembled she looks rather fine.  It is, however, a staggeringly expensive plastic kit (more expensive than the Airfix 1/48 Hawker Hurricane, for example).  It makes you wonder what the future is for Finecast if they are going to make more characters as plastic kits, especially given the recent rumour that Games Workshop are shipping out all their old metal figures for scrap.  It's going to send the cost of second hand old metal figures sky high.  I just sold a set of metal Warhammer figures on eBay for more than I paid for them.

Now usually I undercoat my Lord of the Rings figures in black because it provides a good base for the very muted palette that Peter Jackson's designers use but my recent experience with the Warriors of Erebor was that I struggled to see some of the detail with black undercoat; especially given the bad light that persists in wind and rain riven Britain at present.  Given that these figures have no armour, however, I am going to take a risk and undercoat them in white.  My other issue with them is that I have no visual reference for them.  I haven't bought the two Desolation of Smaug Chronicles books yet, which always give a lot of costume details.  I don't trust the Games Workshop colour schemes.

More fundamentally, I haven't managed to watch the film itself as everyone I know who would have seen it with me has already seen it.  I think I've missed it at the cinema now, which means it's the first of Peter Jackson's Tolkien films I haven't watched on the big screen.  It's staggering to think that I first watched The Fellowship of the Ring on New Year's Eve in 2001 - more than twelve years ago.   I saw it with friends in a cinema in Bath and they switched off the heating about half way through.  The scenes in the mines of Moria still make me shiver as by this point in the cinema we were all frozen, as it was a bitterly cold night.

No date for the release of the DVD yet so I need to do some more research on the costumes.  I think I will start with Tauriel as there are a few pictures on the internet of her, although she seems to have several different costumes in the film.

New White Dwarf dumps The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings?

Games Workshop have officially announced their two new magazines to replace White Dwarf today.  White Dwarf becomes a very short 32 page weekly (stunted, indeed) and the monthly magazine is now called Warhammer Visions. From my point of view the interesting thing is that they have removed mention of The  Hobbit (and, therefore, by implication, the whole Lord of the Rings game) from the cover.  This means, I can only assume that only Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are now core games for Games Workshop.

I will have a look at them when they come out next Saturday.

Grim Hammer bases re-done

When I first painted my Grim Hammers I gave them bases to match my Moria dwarves.  Now, however, I want to build the forces for the battle of Dimril Dale which means a normal base.  I have, therefore, redone the bases to match my warriors of Erebor.  This is now starting to look like a force, as it's twenty five figures!  Positively an army, by my standards!  I've now painted over 90 Good figures for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit!

Next up are the Rangers of Mirkwood and the Tauriel my daughter got me for my birthday this month.

I think I better get some orcs next!

Warriors of Erebor

I got these done comparatively quickly for me.  I bought them on December 12th so to get them finished on January 19th was very rapid.  I painted them in a very muted colour scheme, largely black, as that's the way they appear in the film.  

I also didn't highlight the metal parts (of which there are quite a lot as many of them are basically wearing the same armour as the Grim Hammers) as, again, I didn't want them to be too shiny.  I used Boltgun Metal for the armour and then gave it a black wash to dull it down.

The box contains 12 warriors but there are not instructions on how to assemble them so I just followed the poses on the box.  With historical plastic sets I have got used to there being a lot of options as around interchangeability of heads, arms etc.  I am not sure to what extent swapping around some of the arms is possible with this set (heads are attached to torsos so no options there) but when I get the next set I will look at this.

Here are the sprues from the set.  Half the figures have, for want of a better word, polearms, and the others have axes and shields.  Although there are no optional parts in the box there are 12 shields so if you don't attach shields to the figures with two handed weapons then you do end up with some spare ones.  I am contemplating buying some of the normal Lord of the Rings dwarves and giving them the Erebor eight sided shields to add a bit of variety.

That said, the troops in the film have the polearms and shields but I think I prefer them as I have done them, which is the way they are done on the box cover.  Incidentally, this behind the scenes shot gave me the only picture I have seen of the reverse of the shields: reddish brown wood with black radial bands going into the centre of the shields from each apex. 

There have been lots of anti Games Workshop comments as a result of their poor profit announcement recently and although I did buy a few Warhammer and 40K figures I could never get into either the rules or the figures.  The Lord of the Rings figures (despite their ridiculous prices) are very nice, though, (better proportions help) so I will continue to pick these up (not that I am short of LotR figures to paint. I can see at least 12 boxed from where I am sitting and I have many more that that).

Next I need to get some orcs but, because of the non uniformed nature of these they will take longer to paint.

You're going to hear me Thror!

So, I have finished my first figure from The Hobbit: Thror, King of Erebor.  He is one of those ludicrously expensive Finecast pieces but at least I got him at Dark Sphere so got him at a discount.

Like some of Games Workshops Tolkein figures he is a bit of an amalgalm of looks from the film.  His distinctive beard jewellery comes from the scenes inside Erebor, particularly, in the extended version, from when he meets the elves.  Yet the model is in fighting mode but in the film the beard jewellery (beardellery?) isn't worn in his brief battle scene.  

Incidentally, most painted figures I have seen make the colour on his beardellery blue but the stills from the film show it as definitely black so I dug out mt little used Humbrol number 21 gloss black for this.

I had no issues with this Finecast figure other than the cost and a rather bendy sword which I couldn't get to straighten out however much I (carefully tried).  No holes or pits or any of the other things people moan about.  The only issue was the complication of cutting him from the sprue which has much chunkier connectors to the figure than a plastic figure and alittle more carving away of excess material is, therefore needed.

Some Erebor dwarves next!

The Desolation of Smaug supplement

The bear necessities

You don't have any posts on the blog for eight months and then two come along within a few days!  My renewed enthusiasm for all things Tolkien has been engendered by watching the extended version of The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey and listening to the new Howard Shore soundtrack for The Desolation of Smaug.

I went into Games Workshop in Oxford Street yesterday to pick up the warriors of Erebor, as I liked the Battle of Dimrill Dale in An Unexpected Journey between the dwarves and the orcs.  

I also picked up the supplement for The Desolation of Smaug which has five scenarios from the new film (including one for their £40 set of Thorin's company in barrels!) but also three built around the Battle of Dimrill Dale from the first film.  It also takes each of the scenarios for the first book and the second and puts them together to build one continuous campaign.  This, of course, is probably why we haven't seen any gaming articles in White Dwarf this year as there are scenarios in the book based on the film, plus some more generic ideas for battles in Mirkwood.  One of the scenarios, however, requires 18 mirkwood spiders.  These cost £22 for two so you will need to spend £198 on spiders for this one!

There are some pictures of a few figures which haven't been released yet, including Beorn in his bear form (top) and armoured orcs of Gundabad (above) which look like an imminent plastic box set.  I'm not sure about the design of these but at least they look quick to paint as they are quite uruk hai-like.  The Laketown guard look very silly, I'm afraid, but that isn't Games Workshop's fault!  What there isn't is any hint of Smaug so perhaps he will come for the final film.

So for me it will be dwarves versus orcs for a bit (although those Mirkwood rangers do look awfully nice!)

There are some painting guides and pictures of other people's armies to pad it out a bit and, of course, profiles for the new figures.

Starting a couple of Dwarves...

Despite the rubbish support for The Hobbit from Games Workshop I still like some of the figures and have started work on a couple this weekend.  I watched the extended version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey this weekend in preparation for going to see the Desolation of Smaug over Christmas (I have to wait until my daughter returns from university!)  It was she who selected Bombur for me to work on.  I also wanted to have a go at a Finecast figure so pulled out my outrageously expensive King Thror to do.  I had hoped to paint him on Sunday but events conspired against me so I have only just started him.

Thror is a two part Finecast kit with an additional shield.  I couldn't find any faults on mine except for some slight damage to part of the shield rim which I have fixed with greenstuff.  The sword is very flimsy and is as bendy as an Airfix Ancient Britain!  I did need to use a bit of liquid Greenstuff to fill some slight gaps between the two halves when stuck together but it would have been the same for a metal kit too, I think.

I've got plenty of pictorial reference for both figures but they are very small so I think I may have to break out a new Windsor and Newton Series 7 for them!  I tried to do a bit on Thror last night but I have realised that I am going to need daylight to work on black undercoated figures.  I bought the new Howard Shore Hobbit soundtrack today but it seems, rather like An Unexpected Journey, to be lacking in strong melodies which certainly wasn't the case for his three Lord of the Rings scores.  Still, it's atmospheric stuff and means I now have 17 hours and 18 minutes of Howard Shore Lord of the Rings music to paint to, which should keep me in the right mood.

I also bid on a few metal LotR figures on eBay today as I notice that many of the LotR figures have disappeared from the Games Workshop catalogue and, eventually, I want to get them all!

Games Workshop not really supporting The Hobbit

I went into Games Workshop in Oxford Street today and fancied buying King Thror, as I have been enjoying painting some character figures for my new Roman army,  Not only did they not have one but the GW guy seemed very uncertain about the figures in the range. When I asked if they had the set of the Men of Dale he started looking in the (very limited) LotR boxes rather than the very distinctive The Hobbit sets.

This lack of stock (alright it is the week after the DVD came out but they should have allowed for that), his lack of knowledge of the range and the derisory treatment of the game in White Dwarf makes me wonder why on earth they spent so much money on the licence if they aren't going to support it.  Other than the launch issue there has been nothing in White Dwarf for months.  Even worse, until this month's issue, they have all been sealed in plastic so you don't find this out until after you have bought it.  

Maybe, especially given the prices, they really do believe, as Jervis Johnson was recently quoted as saying, that GW figures are now about collecting not gaming.

Frankly, I believe that the White Dwarf team are being lazy and unimaginative.  So, admittedly The Hobbit is not full of set piece battles but come on, make something up!

The Hobbit: Grim Hammers Dwarves Part 2

I finished the box of Grim Hammers at the weekend and they came out OK without being brilliant.  Apart from the fact that I seem to have lost my ability to paint at present the detail of the armour on these at the side of the figures (always a problem with plastics) was little blurred.  I was going to paint their lower armour plate be plate but the detail was not precise enough so I had to resort to dry brushing.  I decided to go for the mountain interior base colour like my LotR goblins and existing dwarves.  I can always repaint them if I decide to go for a traditional grassy base.

Here is the design for one of the dwarves from The Hobbit Chronicles book which contains a lot of useful costume shots for all the characters from the film.  I can't actually remember who they fought in the film so need to wait for the DVD which is due out next month.  The armour is darker than the Boltgun Metal paint I used so I might add a black wash in the future.

A few of Thorin's company next, I think.

The Hobbit v The Lord of the Rings dwarves: size comparison

I finished one of my new Grim Hammers dwarves today (they are going to take longer to paint than I imagined) and am posting this picture of him next to a LotR dwarf.  It's hard to tell, because of the heavy armour, but I reckon he is about half a head taller than the older figures.

Now I am very fussy about figures of different sizes but I wouldn't have any problem fielding them in the same force.  Things like their hands are exactly the same size, for example.  Games Workshop have previewed some more new Dwarves from The Hobbit today so I shall have to get some of them and maybe they will offer a better comparison.  The more dwarves the better!

My daughter wants me to get the new Thror figure but my head says that paying £12 for a dwarf is insane but I'm sure I'll get it anyway!

The Hobbit: Grim Hammers Dwarves Part 1

I was in Oxford Street last week and nipped into Games Workshop to pick up the new Grim Hammers dwarves from The Hobbit.  They cost £20 for 12 figures which is a not very impressive inversion of the prices for the plastic sets from The Lord of the Rings from a few years ago when you got 20 figures for £12.  The small number of figures is apparent as soon as you open the box as you get just one sprue.  Apparently, they have reduced the number of figures in their other sets too.  The last box of plastics I completed was the Uruk Hai Scouts which used to have twenty four figures in a box but now you get just one sprue of twelve figures.  Interestingly, the plastic set of twelve Uruk Hai now costs £15 as against the £20 for the twelve The Hobbit dwarves.  The difference being the cost of the new licence, perhaps, or maybe they are just trying it on.

The figures are very nice, however, and, unlike most plastic sets, you get twelve different bodies with the arms being (mostly) separate.  The weapons are very fine and quite delicate.  The figures are attached to the sprue by very chunky lumps of plastic.  You certainly can't just twist them off.  You'll need a pair of clippers and then a very sharp knife to clean them up.  

Cutting the bodies off the sprue and sticking them to the bases took twenty minutes.  I can see why some people don't like plastics because of the assembly time but, in contrast to metals there was no cleaning up to do as there was no flash and no discernible mould lines.

The dwarves completed as on the box

The next stage of assembly wasn't so quick, however.  There were no instructions in the box (I'm not sure if there are supposed to be or not) and so it was a puzzle trying to work out which bodies went with which arms.  It also wasn't clear whether any set of arms goes with any body.  Rather than risk it I followed the arm/body combinations on the box although this meant studying the components very closely and comparing them with the photographs on the back of the box.  Some arm combinations were numbered A and B so I assumed that these went together which seemed to be the case but it would have been nice if this had been made clear.  I'm not sure a ten year old would have managed it.  It took me over an hour to work out which arms went with which body and then stick them on which was also a fiddly process as you had often had to align two arms at the same time before the glue dried.

So next I have to fill the gaps on the bases, texture them with sand and undercoat them.  All my other Lord of the Rings dwarves have grey rocky bases to represent Moria. I'm not sure yet whether I will do the same for these or do my usual grassy bases (which is how Games Workshop have painted them).

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Weeks after everyone else saw it I actually got out to see The Hobbit with the children on Sunday.  Although we were all keen to see it there hasn't been a point since December when one or other of us haven't had one of the dreaded bugs going around.  In fact, we only just got to see it as it has already gone from most of the local cinemas and, indeed, we had to trek over to Staines to watch it.

I was interested in it from two perspectives, of course, as a film and as an inspiration for wargames using some of Games Workshop's horrendously expensive figures.

As a film, I read a few negative reviews but many of these had to be read on the basis that they were written by conventional, rather than genre, critics.  As a long time fan of science-fiction I well know that most critics hate SF and fantasy and the more prevalent it has become in the cinema the more they hate it.  Anyway, as a film, again, there were two things I was interested in: the story and drama and, if you like, the texture of the film.  By this I mean sets, costumes, lighting, special effects and everything that builds the world of Tolkien on the screen.

As far as the film is concerned it was, in many ways, a no-win situation for Peter Jackson.  He had set the bar very high with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and following up a multiple Oscar winning film was always going to be difficult, especially with a children's book as source material.  The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was his The Phantom Menace; having to succeed with viewers who had expectations from the original trilogy as well as those who were too young to have seen the originals at the cinema (yes, it is that long ago now!).  Then there are those for whom the book is everything and I have seen comments on The Miniatures Page to the effect that "I will never forgive Peter Jackson for what he did to The Lord of the Rings".  Frankly, I always find it amazing that people think that filmmakers should slavishly follow the book that a film is based on.  They are such different media and engage the brain in such different ways and over a very different time scale that it is really not comprehensible that anyone would actually film a book in a completely slavish way.  It would end up eighteen hours long and completely tedious.  The fact that Jackson has nine hours to lavish on The Hobbit did not get him to film every scene from the book but to create new ones for dramatic effect.  Film is a dramatic medium and questions of pace and rhythm are more critical to filmmakers when telling a story than to novelists.

I think Jackson got it pretty spot on.  Several critics said that the film was slow to start but I think that this was an important part of setting up the adventures to come.  Only by seeing Bilbo in his domestic environment could you empathise with the outlandish and dangerous incidents that follow.  Also it is the first of a trilogy so the prologue in the Shire is there to preface three films not just one: a five minute introduction wouldn't do.

Speaking of introductions, Jackson mirrored the approach he took to The Fellowship of the Ring in adding a "historical" prologue (which was a last minute addition to the original film) which puts the dragon Smaug and the dwarves in context.  It explains the meaning of the quest.  The whole film, in fact, follows the structure of The Fellowship very closely and this, for me anyway, is a good thing.  The historical background, the introduction of the Hobbit protagonist and his world, the gathering of the fellow travellers, perilous interludes, a context-setting interval in Rivendell, more perilous interludes before finishing on a geographical high point overlooking the region of the next part of the quest.

I'm not going to go into plot or differences from the book but I thought it worked as drama, didn't drag and looked wonderful.  The latter is important to me as a good part of the enjoyment of the films is immersing oneself in a fully realised and believable world.  The combined CGI and real New Zealand locations worked their magic again.  Some of the background digital matte work was not quite as good as it could have been but I have been told that this looks better in the 42 fps showings.  I actually don't think all-digital environments are an improvement on the detailed model work in the LotR trilogy as the models exude that extra bit of reality.  Likewise, the CGI characters are not, for me as good as men in costume.  But for the most part I was too absorbed to notice any minor shortcomings in these areas.

What was triumphant, once more, was the design and photography.  The colour, I felt, was rather brighter and more saturated than the original trilogy which was quite monochrome for long passages. The Hobbit is a more colourful film.

Howard Shore's music is Middle Earth for me and he has come out with another fine score although, Misty Mountains theme apart, it doesn't reach the melodic heights of The Two Towers or even The Fellowship of the Ring.

There has been quite a lot of discussion about the look of some of the denizens of Middle Earth and their differences from their equivalents in the original films.  I am still not sure about the non-dwarf proportions of some of the dwarves and I think the goblins were inferior to those in The Fellowship but I thought the Wargs were better.  The rather peculiar look of the dwarves serves to differentiate them in a way that just having the different coloured hoods in the book wouldn't have, given the number of them.

Anyway, the different dwarfs will be more interesting to paint once I get going on the Games Workshop figures.  I admit to not having been very inspired by the initial releases of these but things have improved recently with the new elf cavalry and, above all, the armoured dwarves.  The latter is the first set that I actually can't wait to buy and get painted.  In the meantime I have the boxed set, escape from Goblin Town, the trolls and the hunter orcs on fell Wargs to be going on with.  The Wargs versus elves will be a natural match up although it's a lot of mounts to paint!

Many of the figures issued by Games Workshop so far are really character pieces rather than wargaming figures and it was interesting to see Jervis Johnson in this month's White Dwarf say that the "Games Workshop hobby" is "primarily about collecting".  Well, no, isn't it supposed to be about gaming?  Certainly the Lord of the Rings has suffered more than some of the other games from collector's piece syndrome and it looks like The Hobbit is going to be even more so.

I have to say that the price of Games Workshop's The Hobbit figures continues to stagger me.  Twenty five pounds for a mounted character with a foot equivalent is shocking!  Twenty pounds for 12 dwarves would be just about OK if they were metal but they're plastic!

I had waited to see the film before I got going on painting any figures.  One thing that I have learned is that you can't rely on is the Games Workshop paint jobs which are invariably brighter then their equivalents in the films.  Fortunately, I recently bought The Hobbit Chronicles which is particularly detailed on the film's costumes.

So, although I have started on the trolls don't be surprised if it's the dwarves that you see posted here first!