In the last Missive from Middle Earth I outlined something approaching a plan to build upon the handful of Galadhrim I've already painted and and I'm pleased to say that I'm off to a pretty good start with a further three Galadhrim arriors with hand and a half weapons. A part of me wonders if I may come to regret not equipping them with shields considering this makes them Defence 5 rather than Defence 6, but a few factors played into my decision to leave them 'as is'.
Firstly, while I was assembling the Galadhrim Knights, I read an article (that I now cannot remember the name of, but which was probably on Tell me a tale great or small) which said something along the lines of 'if you're 'shielding' then you're not making strikes' and given that strikes are required to win combat, you're merely delaying the inevitable by not making them'. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a complete novice when it comes to the rules of the MESBG, but that makes a lot of sense to me.
Secondly, although I can see some cases, such as Dwarves from Erebor, for example, where an unbreakable anvil of troops clad in heavy armour and braced behind a shieldwall is both desirable and thematic, but the imagery of such static positions doesn't really play to the graceful and fluid way that I envisage the Elves of Lothlorien making war.
And finally, from a practical perspective, there's really only one miniature on the Galadhrim warriors sprue that's actually capable of holding a shield (the one to the far left in the photo above) and to be honest, I think they look cooler without one. I suppose I could have had a go at gluing shields to the backs of the others, but due to the way their cloaks fall, I didn't think this would have looked very good at all.
Weighing it all up, I came to the conclusion that no shields not only looked more aesthetically pleasing, it made more thematic sense and it will mean that in games, I'll be getting my Elves moving around and stuck into trying to win fights rather than having them hide behind a shieldwall.
When it comes to painting, I usually block in and then shade all the basecoats before working on one element of the model in turn and generally I move from the 'inside, out'. For the Galadhrim, this means starting out by finishing their boots, then their tunics (brown first, then crimson) before moving on to the armour, then finally their cloaks, skin and hair. I find that not only does this make for a cleaner finish to the minis, because I can tidy up any mistakes as I go, but it also breaks them down into more manageable sections where progress is easily visible. Being able to see progress helps to keep me motivated to work on them as well as ensuring more consistency across common elements, so that the models look good individually and collectively, which is exactly what I'm aiming for with a project like this.
I'll do a more detailed breakdown of all of the colour 'recipes' I've used for the Galadhrim in a future post, but in this one, I thought I'd devote a little space to their distinctive golden armour. While I was painting the first pair of warriors a few months ago I had originally planned to paint the armour like so:
1) basecoat with Retributor Armour,
1) basecoat with Retributor Armour,
2) apply a shade of Seraphim Sepia,
3) tidy up with a thin layer of Retributor Armour,
4) layer/highlight with Liberator Gold,
5) highlight the edges with Stormhost Silver
As I got to step 3 though, I found that the gold of the scale and plate armour was all looking a bit dull and samey. I sat and pondered on it for a little while before remembering an article in White Dwarf at some point in the 2010s (possibly for the first release of the third edition of Space Hulk) which mentioned using purple to shade areas of gold ornamentation on armour. This seemed worth a try, so I grabbed my pot of Druchii Violet and carefully painted it into all of the recesses of the armour plates. The purple did exactly what I wanted, not only did it enrich and define the armour plates themselves, it also helped differentiate them from the scale mail worn beneath it. Satisfied with the results and thinking I might want to replicate them again in future, I revised the gold recipe in my painting recipes notebook to include the extra step like so:
1) basecoat all of the armour with Retributor Armour,
2) apply a shade of Seraphim Sepia to all of the armour,
3) shade the recesses of the armour plates Druchii Violet
4) tidy up with a thin layer of Retributor Armour,
5) layer/highlight with Liberator Gold,
6) highlight the edges with Stormhost Silver
before finishing up the rest of the models. Speaking of the rest of the models, here are the remaining ones in the 'to do' pile for this initial foray into Lothlorien. Orophin is a fantastic, if slightly fiddly to assemble miniature and well worth picking up in my opinion. Accompanying him are a pair of warriors with spears, a pair with elven bows and a warrior with banner.
The banner I'm particularly pleased with as it required some delicate 'surgery' to complete the kitbash, but I think it works nicely. Regular readers of the blog will be quite familiar with my lamentations about metal miniatures by now so I shan't rehash them here, but suffice it to say that with how important banners seem to be in the current edition of MESBG, I'm very glad I was able to cobble one together in a stable material!
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