Collins does the defence of Minas Tirith

Ok, so now you’ve seen a small selection of the ruin in a standard photo light box with a nice clean blue background…

Amazing aren’t they, bloody magnificent! could you do better? bet you couldn’t because these are mine and your vote doesn’t count for how I’ll enjoy my toys lol.

But I hear you… battle reports you all cry out for! and I’ve had all these painted minis for almost a year now and still not played a game so how can I provide you with a battle report?

Easy! by using Jon Hodgson’s backdrops…

and maybe a little imagination….

I bought this book from kickstarter but I’m sure if you visit www.handiwork.games you’ll be able to buy your own copy for currency of the realm. You can even buy a commercial license too.

Boom! Terrainfest 2023 challenge complete and even a lovely (not at all cheating) battle report done at the same time, fantastic.

All jokes aside however, im quite happy with how they call came out. I’m super glad I decided to add trees onto the set on pieces. I know that in reality Osgiliath wasn’t depicted as covered in trees and was a bit dark and dower to reflect the impending evil of the oncoming hordes but I think they really add a little bit more interest to the pieces and some much needed colour.

I now have 8 ruined buildings that can easily fill a 3×3 board in an interesting way, all different but all the same and all ready to have a little scrap over on a generic green mat, arguably in multiple systems too, not just MESBG, I can see Star Wars Legion playing out on these too to be fair plenty of ruins encountered in SW games etc

I have a half box of trees left over and a few bags of ground scatter in the box of stuff.

no point going and buying specific stuff when this is a quick get it done section of the project.

So the trees were superglued down where they looked good with half an eye on not blocking line of sight too much so not to affect the benefits the elevation can give in gameplay.

The ground scatter I selected from my box of random hobby stuff was Tiaga Hillside. it kinda struck me as the most New Zealand like bag I had with the little brown pebbles that stick out very much like you can see in the wild in NZ (from my memory at least)

I went quite heavy on the PVA to make sure there was enough to grab the different grades of sands and that way I potentially wouldn’t need to go back over it with a Water/PVA/Varnish mix. trying to save time and utilise the drying/down time as best as possible for me.

Below is a photo taken whilst they’re still wet to see how they look early on

I broke out the airbrush and added two colours

nuln oil (translucent black) and Astra militarium (translucent dark green)

the idea was to add some shadows with the black, eg underneath the arches or in the corners of building which gives so rough defining lines. Also on the cobblestone floors adds an element of weathering to them.

secondly the green around the very bottom of the ruins to show algae growth coming up from dampness splash back during rain etc as the boards they’re on are going to be mud and green textures so it helps blend them in and make them look ‘not set on’. In the image above you can see the left has been greened but the right has not and just how much more natural or real the left one looks with that one different colour

I gave everything that’s stone a reasonable dry brush with pallid witch flesh just like my original bases has had done to them

i tried to see whether I had any emulsion or house paint in a similar colour but they weren’t ‘purple’ enough and generally too warm in hue. So I stuck with GW paint and it didn’t take all that much to be fair so I need not have worried

Before the wood effect was added they looked very bleached out and quite bland. If I was so inclined I could go in and alter some of the stones to a slightly different light grey for variety but atm it really is a case of bash it out for the end of the month (competition).

now with the wood painted with contrast paint it is starting to look a bit more than simply a grey block

So I’m no expert at oil washes but this is how I do it.

I dump this much brown oil paint into a shot glass and then add small amounts of solvents and gently work the solvent into the paint rather than the paint into the solvent.

once all dissolved i then add more solvents until I have the consistency and volume I want.

I also use a synthetic brush that I don’t really care about.

In attempt to speed up the drying time I put a desk fan on it just to create a breeze to carry away the solvents. It worked well but the points of contact (with the table or base) still were wet. Overall, worth it.

next up drybrushing and glue

this is the same wall paper I’ve used for the models in this project.

at first I just started randomly cutting out and laying down but half way through I realised that the smooth cut lines wouldn’t be how the stone flooring would fall apart. sure it would break up but not in nice smooth cut lines.

so I went back in and started cutting out following the pattern of the bricks to try and make it look a lot more natural. it might however all change when I paint and add scatter to the bases.

Im not certain what happened here! when priming with a warmed and shaken (not stirred!) grey seer rattle can I seem to have had some bubbles form on some of the ruins (not consistently, randomly). these were eliminated by another pass but does anybody know why this happened?

As I have 2 sets of the ruins terrain (because one is never enough) I started off by following the guide to learn how to use the kit.

I spent 1 night making each ruin, watching a lot of TV at the same time.

once id made the four following the guide I went off piste for the next four just going with what I thought would be cool.

im glad I did as I feel the 3×3 size buildings are a bit too big and boring (note, I’ve never played the game) so I went with 3×2 as a nice compromise instead

With the steam running out on this project (or taken up by walking dead) I needed something to give me the umpf to get back into it. Cue another BOW/OTT challenge!

This time, the box has a perfect section just for this challenge, the actual ruins of osgiliath! the new part of this boxed set and the good excuse for GW to package it all up and call it a deal!

to be fair to them, the ruins are really well detailed and quite impressive given that I’ve not really looked at a GW kit for about 15 years (or rather not bought a new design/made GW kit).

I’ll add some trees to these to give it abit more ‘life’ in an overgrown way

Following all the previously documented steps for Minas Tirith armour it didn’t take too long to paint up these commanders and support troops. More gold was used than normal to pick them out as special amongst the rank and file.

It might make them an easier target for my opponent but really its all about looking about looking cool.

For some reason these things go for silly money on eBay! I expect they were £12-15 back in the day but now eBay has them going for anywhere between £40-70 on a regular basis, mental.

This is again mostly contrast (except faces) following previously documented methods and I’m happy with how they came out. I really like the strings having two colours on them to show some form of reinforcing or binding of the string or sinew.

the wood was aggaros dunes

string was gor grunta fur and gulliman flesh

metal was bolt gun metal and basilican grey

These rangers are full contrast painting. all the shading is reverse highlighting where I colour in the shadows rather than painting brighter colours on the high areas.

They took a little longer than I would have liked but they came out alright.

Just the characters from Osgiliath to go!

So I’m not thrilled with how these cloaks came out, the baby wipe material could pass for really weird fur or rough hessian but I don’t think it passes as cloth particularly well. The contrast paint didn’t flow into the folds of the fabric due to the ‘fluffiness’ of the baby wipe being far too attractive for the pooling nature of the paint.

I decided to mix up the colours to add a little bit of something something to the overall silver and black of the rest of then army.

all in all I won’t be using the baby wipe method again for this purpose.

Following on from the tests I did earlier I built and added wet wipe cloaks or bedrolls soaked in matt medium to the warriors with the aim of showing them as Osgiliath vets without buying the specific metal models.

I did start off trying to use PVA but I found it to be far too sticky and hard to mould to what shapes I wanted.

This was a cheats way of doing this to try and avoid using green stuff. it was quicker but it left a strange texture on the cloaks which might* be passable as really rough fabric, time will tell.

During the ‘sculpting’ stage I cut out isosceles trapezoids and the cut a semicircle out of the short (top) side where the neck of the cloak would be. I then glued the top of the cloak to the model with superglue and titivated the rest of it to a shape that was vaguely ‘flowing cape’ like. some worked well, others not so much.

*or might not

The bedrolls over the shoulders were a lot easier.

I simply cut long thin strips, soaked in matt medium and then rolled into thin sausages and bent over the models shoulder supergluing the meeting point at the hip.

another super simple paint job using the metal prime and contrast method from the warriors. quick and looks fine on the tabletop.

These pictures are a good example of how your iPhone tries to figure out the light balance and can get it wrong

Now for this I decided that I was going to go with quite a light colour for the wood. most wood is painted quite a dark brown as wargamers always go ‘oh wood, that’s brown’ getting confused between wood and tree trunks. sure there are redwoods and dark woods in the world but a lot of the strong hard woods eg oak, are actually quite light in colour.

agreos dunes was the contrast paint of choice used for this followed up with a tyrant skull dry brush to ‘silver’ it up a bit. I then went back in and added streaks of agreos dunes too try and add grain and disguise the fact its contrast paint. didn’t work well in some areas due to being too heavy handed on the first pass but never mind.

the metal was bolt gun metal and basilican grey wash. the rock bag was skeleton horde and the rope was gor grunta fur.

this is a quick paint job just like the rest of the force (contrast mainly) and so minimal effort involved. the hardest part was gluing it together and then pinning it to the base.

Basically did the same as all the infantry for this version of Faramir. I did opt however to buy him the optional upgrade of googly eyes for -5 pts

With only one sculpt of each weapon type for Osgiliath vets I decided to try and cheap out and utilise some of the regular dudes and mark them with capes and bedrolls to make them stand out.

Here we have a baby wipe cut up and soaked in matt medium. I didn’t let it dry but I think it might be best to use modpodge or PVA rather than matt medium.

Prime and paint would be an easy way for an all in one. I could also add them post painting by dying them with wash, that would also work but increases the risk of wash/ink going where you don’t want it

quite possibly the easiest model I’ve painted.

prime in white and then 3 shades of contrast (black, grey and white) in the reverse highlight (colour in the shadows) with the face and hands being painted with the standard GW flesh tones, bugman, cadian, Kislev and reikland. I did go one higher with palid wytchflesh though

First attempt at a list with what’s painted

• Gandalf the white sepia – 240pts
  • Shadowfax
• Peregrin Took – 30pts
  • elven cloak
• Captain of Minas Tirith – 55pts
  • shield
• 25 Warriors of Minas Tirith – 230
  • 8 sword & shield
  • 8 spear & shield
  • 8 bow & sword
  • 1 Banner and sword
• 7 Knights of Minas Tirith – 122
  • 6 shield
  • 1 banner

677 points total

All I’ve got to do now is learn how to play the game, play the game and decide whether it was all worth the effort!

Oh, and expand further on it, the captain and banners (foot and mounted) aren’t part of the battlehost box but picked up from eBay…