Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Tutorial: Dwarven Warrior from Middle-earth

This week my attention turned to some more Middle-earth miniatures for our ongoing RPG campaign. I need Dwarves!


I picked up a box of Dwarf Warriors from eBay for about $10 off of retail...not a bad deal I suppose. The box contained 24 plastic Dwarves. I only needed 21 for the campaign, so those got clipped and assembled.

The castings were good and they went together quickly. I needed one standard bearer, so I cut the two-handed axe off of one of the models and inserted a fantasy banner from Reaper.

So...starting with the bare plastic model, I went ahead and put the basing sand on straight away.

Primed in white. I wanted a light surface to paint on. Dwarves are small, and they really need to pop on the table or your eye skips right over them. So I'm going to try to stick with some lighter colors (or as light as I can get away with, anyway).

A black ink wash. I do this to see where the detail on the figure is. Gives me a better chance of not missing anything on the mini.

I started with the skin and used Foundry's standard 3 skin tones with a wash of GW Ogryn Flesh wash in between the first and second tones. I also did the shield at this point...no particular reason other than painting 200 Dwarf fingers all in a row is boring. I needed a break.

Metal next. The armor is Reaper Aged Bronze with a P3 Armor Wash followed with a drybrush of Reaper Tarnished Brass. The helm is Reaper Aged Gold with a wash of the dark orange ink/matt medium I mixed up a month ago. It also has a highlight of Bright Gold. Iron trim and the axe head are Reaper Shadowed Steel with a highlight of Reaper Polished Silver.


Next I did leather, cloth and wood. The jerkin is in Foundry's Rich Butternut paint series, while the shirt is Foundry's Tomb Blue. I used Vallejo New Wood for the shaft of the axe.

Finally I moved onto the hair and used Reaper's excellent red head paint series (which includes the Carrot Top paint color...excellent name!).

At this point I finished off the base with orange and off-white, shot the fig with Tester's Dullcoat and then added the static grass with some white glue.

And done.

I tell you...after doing that cavalry last week, Dwarves are a godsend. They're small, and simple, and quick as lightening to pump out. These GW sculpts and casts are very smooth and a pleasure to work with.

I'll post pics of the entire finished company in a week or two.

'Til next time.

3 comments:

  1. Nice work Kevin. You make it all look so easy.

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  2. Beautiful work - and a nicely done tutorial!

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  3. Good work, Kevie...like the red hair especially.

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