I bought all the Wildlings from Dark Sword Miniatures’ Song of Ice and Fire collection. There are twelve of them, some generic warriors and some named characters from the books. I had wanted these miniatures for a long time already, but now I finally found an excuse to actually order them. They will be used as dunlendings in my One Ring RPG campaign that is set in Rohan.

The miniatures are very finely detailed and most have really dynamic poses. Painting them was once again really enjoyable, as is usually the case with Dark Sword’s products. Their miniatures are always of really exceptional quality.

I chose to use a very limited palette to make all of those individuals look like they could be from the same culture that has somewhat limited supply of colourful fabrics. Aside from metals and basic skin tones, I chose to use beige, dark brown, white, black and bluish black almost exclusively. A couple of early experiments have more reddish brown and some miniatures have little colourful details.

I varied the amount of shadow and highlight, for example occassionally highlighting beige to almost white and sometimes washing and glazing it to look like yellowish brown leather. The same with bluish black, sometimes I let it go all the way to blue greys, sometimes I left it almost black.

The hair colours are more varied than what Tolkien describes dunlendings having. Of course, Ygritte and Tormund should be redheads, but I also painted some blondes because only black hair would soon have become boring to paint.

The bases have white sand as snow; suitable for wildlings beyond the Wall, but also for dunlendings living in the vales of the White or Misty Mountains. The sand as snow looks a bit too coarse, but is OK for me.

The model comes with several parts allowing different versions and configurations. I chose to build the model in the same manner it was presented in the box cover and I also chose the same paint scheme since it looked so nice in the picture.

I don’t play Warhammer, but I might have admired aloud the fantastic miniatures Fantasy Battle and 40k players get to paint, so I got one as a birthday present last summer. It took me roughly half a year to paint this beast (though playing through Baldur’s Gate II and a couple of Dragon Age games may have slowed down my painting a bit).

For those interested in the technology, this is a static site generated from Markdown files using the Jekyll site generator. I wanted to take the control of my content into my own hands, instead of having it in Google.

The skin is based with Vallejo’s Dark Fleshtone with some beige mixed in for highlights. Metal parts show black primer under first dry-brush layer of bronze darkened with black, and a second dry-brush layer of Leadbelcher (old Boltgun Metal). The leathers are simply Vallejo’s Scorched Earth mixed with beige for higlight layers. After painting everything I splashed a generous amount of brown wash with Agrax Earthshade all over the miniature to make him look a bit dirty and to tie the colours together. That’s my standard technique for all orcish creatures. His face paint is simply White Scar painted on top of the skin after the wash had dried.

I painted Saruman’s White Hand on his shield to further show his allegiance. Painting orc symbols freehand is really easy because the orcs are not known as great artists, so the symbols don’t have to look anywhere perfect.

I started by basecoating the skin, hair and robes with a neutral dark grey and added a bit of Space Wolves Grey into each highlight layer. For the last couple of highlights I added white instead of grey.

The armour is Shining Gold over Balthasar Gold base. I added some depth to it with washes of Reikland Flesh Shade and a light glaze/wash with a mix of Thraka Green and Guilliman Blue. The sword is Boltgun Metal/Chainmail/Silver with green and blue glazes.

Unfortunately my first attempt was not satisfactory for me and I repainted the model today, two days late. The original attempt was more colourful, which did not work well for this model and since I painted it in the evenings under a desk lamp, I had not noticed some ink blotches etc.

Here is a work-in-progress shot of mounted Elrohir. I have just finished painting his horse.

To make it easier to recognise them during a game I went for a black and white horse. I also started basecoating the elves themselves, just the face and some deepest details like boots and trousers are painted.

And here is the finished Elladan:

It looks like I never took photos of the finished Elrohir.

It would be nice to buy a set of Rivendell Knights from the Hobbit movie to accompany the mounted versions.

I painted him very simply, just different brown basecoats, and some shading mostly with Agrax Earthshade and highlights with lighter browns. I refused to paint the bird poo on his hair, though.