Black...! Black...!

The plan with my new Mythical Earth army was always to re-visit the army I had as a a teenager, and as such it is based on the 'bad guys' in the range, which is to say all those orcs and goblins and what-not. Having knocked together a fair number of troop units I thought I'd have a go at giving them some commanders in the form of what Minifigs called the Ringwraith/Nazgul (M57) and Skeleton Man (M32 mounted on M60).

Ringwraith/Nazgul ME57

And here we come to the tricky bit: how to paint  black? Never an easy one and I've ducked the issue  almost entirely by painting the flying beastie thing darkish grey, mixing in a little green to soften the colour a little.

Otherwise, I've gone for dark grey patches on the rider to show off the swirling... whatever it is. Could be a cloak. Could be a bedsheet if bedsheets were black. maybe it's just smoke and plain nastiness. We may never know. 

Is it a bird? 

The model was stripped of its 70s enamels and lashings of contact adhesive, before reassembly using superglue and greenstuff. Once I'd posed the wings to my liking I discovered the rider would no longer fit - note to self check rider for fit before fixing wings next time (eight to go after all). I resolved the issue using greenstuff and my special powers of bodging. 

Is it a plane?

I drilled out a hole underneath to take a length of brass rod, which I duly inserted into the beastie with hardly a squawk on its part or mine. The other end sits in a round mdf base - my first departure from standard 70s basing but a necessary one if my nazgul is to remain airborne. 

I managed to keep the overall impression of a 'black rider' on a 'dark beast' whilst giving the thing some life. As always, Orclord's collection on The Stuff of Legends website provided inspiration and I confess to have shamelessly copied the treatment of the rider's face. 

From the top

And finally... I considered all kinds of fancy marbling, flames and lightning patterns but in the end went for this simple solution for the wings. At this point you have to admire the sculptor's lack of concern for the mundanities of actual and credible  physiology in favour of something entirely their own. I still love it. 

 With a flying base it's useful to load the base with terrain to give it weight, but I've steered clear of doing so to keep the same clean look as the rest of the army. The stand is fairly low so I should get away with it. Fingers crossed. 

Skeleton Man (ME32) riding
 Horse for Skeleton Man (ME60)

When I started painting this chap I thought it might be cool to go for a 'four riders' theme: one black, one red, one pale and so on, and I might do that yet. This time though, I thought I'd go down the traditional route and paint the figure black: bony chap, black undernourished horse, black cloak-thing. 

When painting black I like to vary the colour a little by adding a little blue, red, green or brown just to give the thing some shape and separate the different elements. 

This seemed to have worked out okay, although it's not a highly detailed model and you do have to paint on some of detailing, as it were, especially around the legs and feet. 

It's not all that clear where the idea for this model came from. I always supposed that it was meant to represent The Mouth of Sauron, the Black Numenorean emissary of Sauron who treaties with Aragorn and Gandalf before the final battle in The Return of the King. If so, then it's a rather liberal interpretation of the description in the book, where there's no suggestion the character is anything other than a normal human... albeit a very naughty one. 

It makes me wonder whether this was a toe in the water to explore the idea of a larger selection of skeleton warriors, as was to appear in its full form a little later as part of The Valley of the Four Winds range. It's certainly odd that the rider and horse should be sold separately when there's no obvious alternative for either. 

The face withstood a fair touch of improvisation and I was pleased with the way it turned out. It's not quite a skeleton skull and not quite a zombie head, but I've gone bony throughout. The colour is mixed up from dark earth, white and a little black . 

I've gone for a standard cavalry base for this one, and I'm sure that will do for now. You can see that the model's metal base is a little twisted, it's quite a thin base and I think it got a little mangled during a former life. Funny how you always notice at the end... 

Eons ago one of the GW 'Eavy Metal painters showed me a basic technique for highlighting black, which is to just catch the very edges with white or practically white, and then blend to black over a very, very short distance. If you blend through several darker shades as you might for reds, greens and so on, the result ends up looking grey. 

Well that's two baddies done and while I'm at it I thought I'd have a go at a Gondor Citadel Guard... these are also predominantly black! A few folks asked me if I was going to broach the 'goodies' and I must admit I've been putting that off. However, I've now got a unit of these on the bench and this is the test piece. 

Gondor Citadel Guard ME35

This is a very common little model from back in day and one that turns up on the second-hand market regularly. You can also buy the same model from Minifigs as part of their reissued Classic Fantasy line, so he's not hard to get. 

This chap bore stripping, cleaning up and repainting quite well. I decided to liven him up by choosing mostly light colours where I wasn't obliged to go black: trousers, shirt, boots and belt. I also used a lighter more silvery colour for the armour that I would typically use for the bad guys. 

Just for once I started this fellow over a black undercoat because so much of the figure is either black or metal. I normally paint over white and would selectively base coat in black where necessary, mostly because I find pure black bloomin' hard to see these days! 

As (almost) always the mail is beautifully and finely engraved and I have to say it makes a remarkable change from painting modern figures where mail often resembles nothing so much as a string vest.

I've not ventured any heraldry on my guardsman. Tradition has it that the back of the surcoat and/or shield should be daubed with a white tree or - should one be so bold - a tree surmounted by a crown and seven star. Efforts from the 70s generally resemble a mushroom cloud more closely than anything else. Or possibly a mushroom. I wimped out obviously. 

The shield colour is basically black with a little Prussian blue - it needs an edge highlight but I wanted to rule out all possible 'tree' options first. If the shield didn't have the boss I think we'd be in with a chance. As it is... well...