War of the Ring: Updated armies

A little note on - in absence of a true hobby-update - new army pics. These two armies were photographed a week or so ago. Misty Mountains is growing beyond its borders and a Balrog is still not even assembled due to earlier constraints with regards to space.

This Misty Mountains-army will be standardized in base and tray. The difficult part of making this army a unit is that besides the cave-theme (which is far from done), the army lacks character - except for the models' themselves, which are all, with the exception of the WHFB-spiders and the old wargs, very interesting and characterful.
      Characterful most oft' in wargaming (well, Warhammer) means exaggerated noses and hands as well as a funny face, and that cartoony character is fine in itself, but in Lord of the Rings, it has no place. So, when I say character, I mean character within the agreed more realistic stylistic theme of the Weta-production team (amongst others).
     But back to the army: This loss of character is a bit of an oxymoron because this is the army that I most hard tried to give theme and character...

... the original center formation consisting of nine companies of Moria Goblins, I had intended to have a slight zergish feeling, a bit of a cockroachy feel. And then the less-busy wargs were added with their simple trays and bases which made the army look less an army and more like two, or three different pieces. Adding the goblins from The Hobbit further added to this disparate feel.
    I am not entirely sure how to fix this with minimum effort, but some ideas are floating around.
    Goblins aside. We can see the (finally) updated pic of the Rohan Army, also designed with War of the Ring in mind and with tidy company trays. I must confess that the trays are one of the things I like most with War of the Ring... it looks so tidy. Perhaps this says more about me than I want to know :)

Squeezing Sprues: Rivendell Knights

Hey-oooh! Feels bloody damn good bloody good to be back in the hobby saddle.
    I started sculpting the left legs on both the two riders which I am trying to squeeze out of the sprues. Besides the two left legs, there was the conundrum of the half cloaks (you get conversion bits with the Rivendell Knights-sprues with which you can make another captain/knight without helmet) which I am now trying to rectify.

 

Extra shields are made from either Super Sculpey or kneadatite, made in a brown clay press-mould with talc as release agent. It's a cheap and super simple way to get acceptable quality. Not perfect, but tabletop-fine.

    

The extra horses comes from a Haradrim Raider which I retired to the bitsbox but kept the horse. This dynamic horse - it's the one with the head stretched out as much as galloping horse ever will stretch his horse-head - is accompanied by a resin horse, shamelessly copied from a well known knight's horse. The copy is actually pretty shitty.

 

 I've been as busy as these people.

And not to toot my own skin-coloured horn, but I think this is a comeback worthy of Mordor. Rivendell Knights, super expensive but oh so worth it - lovely models, absolutely lovely models. Not sure how to paint them though, as the rest of my Rivendell army is sort of pastelly... I really like the more muted version that is featured on the box...

Hehehehe...

Back with Rivendell Knights!

Back again, after quite the paus... Sorry to leave you all to stare at the mile-long meme-list, but I liked them and figured they would provide some entertainment in lack of other updates.

The problem of housing hasn't been permanently solved, but you could in a way say I have done just that (no, I haven't been incarcerated) - it is not an overly complex situation, but it is not especially interesting, so I leave the subject at that: I am not in prison.
      What matters, though, is that I think I might have solved the problem of lack of hobby space! Updates will show if this is true or not.
      Still, no new job but I can probably live off my savings for a while. I am involved in a time- and paper-consuming process with the institution where I insured me against unemployment - they are reluctant to pay  me since I left the sinking ship before it officially imploded, so to speak. The whole affair is actually costing me more stamps than I have ever used before in my life were I to tally them all up*.

All in all, these few months have been interesting. A little bit of meh-time and a lot of party --->
     With me-stuff out of the way, below is the latest project:

Rivendell Knights - High Elf Cavalry. I bought the box for a whopping 300+ crowns (app. 30 quid) and then went to read up how to squeeze out a few extra riders off the sprues.

Toyed around with a box of Knights of Minas Tirith but figured it would be unnecessary to cut a few riders in half and fiddle around with headswaps without any new heads and so on. So, I decided to try to sculpt the missing pieces myself - barely - and then hide them behind large High Elf-shields.
    Update will follow.

Easter came and went, by the way, and that's a nice segue (not segway) into this welcome:

Welcome new follower, Eastgrinsteadwargamers, which I presume is a bunch of people rather than one white guy, as it normally is.

Easter - eastgrin... Yeah, I don't know, I try my best to get back up in the blogging-saddle.
    This pic is just so beautiful it almost made me want to start up the blogging-computer and do some hobby just to have an excuse to post this image during Easter, but time was scarce then, so the pic is now presented to you, the internet. East-grin is a nice name for a place, by the way.
      If any of you speak Russian - and taking blogger's word for it in form of the traffic-watch on the blog, approximately 20% of the HITS (How Idiots Track Success, as another blogger once said) come from Russia, then quite a few of you probably do.
     I do, however, strongly suspect these hits have more to do with p3nis-3nlargement and spam than a genuine interest for Lord of the Rings, Arda and Midde-Earth - I even suspect some of these readers perhaps aren't even human at all and are unfamilliar with The Hobbit/LotR Strategy Battle game. But I digress: If you know Russian, go to this VK-page. VK is some sort of facebook for Russians (I am a bit of a russophile). Abrupt end.


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*) This sentence probably didn't make grammatical sense.