Refreshing old LoTR

Hello World, it’s bee a while, but I have been continuing to work on my LoTR collection slowly, as time allows. This session I wanted to broach the subject of “hobby fear”.  So I have been wanting to add Shelob to my collection for a while now and GW do a nice metal mini, but I am not a big fan of the default pose and wanted to do something more in line with the movie scenes.

This is where the fear comes in. I’m pretty happy with the usual process; buy model, assemble model, paint model. What I wanted to do was something outside of this and my normal comfort zone. To that end I began by cleaning up all the pieces and trying to figure out what went where:

I spent a couple of evening trying out different posing and basing options. This took quite some time, I cut and re-positioned numerous legs and spent a good couple of hours trying out different options. I wanted to elevate her, but doing a full on cave whilst keeping the model on a playable sized base was a comprimise. I learned from my Witch King that really big bases in LoTR are not your friend. All the while, I felt “the fear”, a little voice in the back of my head kept saying => do the default pose, you’ll only ruin it. I stuck with it however, and after a few nights had a base and a pose that I was happy with.

I’m not going to lie, the models sat like this for probably nearly a year just collecting dust. I kepy putting off starting on them because I was increasingly concerned about messing the models up. I made excuses, like “I need to work on this or that”, or I didn’t really have a plan and every colour scheme that I came up with didn’t seem to work out to look like what I really wanted. So I decided to watch the film scenes a few times. After 3 or 4 watchings of Sam’s heroic fight, I finally worked up the courage to paint the model and did so in the space of one evening.

Once I started I forgot about all the psychological stuff and just reverted to type, slowly painting through the model that I love. I know that there are going to be better paint jobs out there than mine, but she has turned out just the way that I wanted and hopefully next time I won’t be quite so daunted by approaching big, centre piece models.

If you’ve ever had a similar issue with a model then let me know, if you have any top tips, they are always apprecaited.

Cheers,

HMD.