Refreshing old LoTR

Happy Easter Beasts!!!! I hope that your Easter is healthy, safe and filled with relaxing Hobby. Although mine has been somewhat busier that I might have liked, I have managed to work on my “Pile-O-Shame” a bit. With some free time I wanted to try and build a centrepiece for my new Mordor army and re-create one of my favourite scenes from TTT with the Witch King and Frodo (You know the scene). I am not a confident conversion specialist and marvel at the skills of people like Tomas Mennes who seem to be able to form models into amazing positions and make bases out of junk like a Blue Peter Wizard. But needs must, so I grabbed a bunch of very old Hirtarts plaster casted blocks and created something that looks a little bit like a section of Osgiliath.

This lead me to the Fellbeast conversion. I’m not going to lie, this was a total B*#^&rd. It took me a very long time and I’m still not happy with it however, it involved the removal of both legs and the re-positioning of both feet, one of which had to be rebuilt entirely from scratch. I also had to sculpt, which is something that I am woeful at, I suck at just filling in gaps – basic tutorial would be apprecaited here @avernos. However after much swearing and cursing and recutting and repositioning I ended up with a position that wasn’t overly awful and that got painted using Pete the Wargamers tutorial verbatim. I also used @civilcourage advice and purchased a static grass applicator especially for basing this model.  If you haven’t tried one out then I would recommend checking out his 5th Edition project where he goes into some detail on how he achieves massively impressive results with his bases. Would stronglt recommend checking this out. Finally a good friend of mine said the base looked a little empty, so he gave me an old Frodo model of his, which I stripped using the technique described earlier and added to the base.

Even though I am still not 100% on the posing of the model, it really is the best job that I could do with my limited conversion and modelling skills. I think that I am going to have a break from conversion now and go back to painting some regular Orcs, this guy was just too stressful for me.

Anyway, I hope that you like what I’ve done to the regular plastic Witch King and as always, thanks for reading!

HMD