I've been adding to my Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth) armies and finally steeled myself to paint up three figures that I've been dreading! Not because they are especially complicated or involved - far from it - but because no matter what you do with these guys they always look a bit... disappointing.
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| Our Mighty Balrog! |
Here is the grand-daddy of them all - ME30 Balrog - mighty demon of fire and fume - servant of Morgoth and Durin's Bane. For those to whom such things are blissfully unfamiliar, this model is a mere 25mm tall and thus no bigger than a standard infantryman. Even by the dim light that was all we had in the early 1970s, this was something of a disappointment. For some reason the figure has been given the head of a lion, and unkind commentators have likened the sculptor's attempt to represent flames to teddy-bear fur. The rotters.
Not me though. As far as I'm concerned this is the definitive Balrog and I'll not hear a word said against it. It is - however - famously difficult to paint to make it look anywhere near convincing. As you can see, I've had a go, and I'm reasonably pleased with the result, considering it does look like a lion-man in a teddy-bear suit (ooops... curses... just forget I ever said that!).
This particular example was missing his whip as many are. I've replaced it with wire and arranged it to look like the original, which was straight and cast integrally to the base. Most of us snipped this from the base and arranged the soft-lead whip into a more dangerously whippy shape. Which is why it's hard to find an original one that isn't broken, of course. I've done it this way because makes a more solid figure for gaming. Once I've convinced my opponent to stop teasing me about the size of my Balrog, that is.
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| Black Rider he's so black |
Number two on our list of the unpaintable is the Black Rider. What makes this fellow something of a challenge is that it's basically a chap wrapped in a black cowl and cloak riding a black horse with - yes you guess it - black gear. I've tried to give this one some interest by painting the horse, rider and kit in different shades of black... if there is really such a thing.
The tricky thing about black is that any attempt at highlights will tend to make the result look grey, and you really can't win whatever you do. The best bet is to keep the highlights to a minimum and make the transition to black very short, but I've compromised a bit by painting in the folds of the rider's cloak. Our horse gets a light touch of brown, but over all... well it's a Black Rider and you can't change that without going seriously off piste... tangerine rider, taupe ride, teal rider, etc.
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| Still black |
Here he is front the front. As you see, the horse has suffered the indignity of having a supporting pin inserted into his chest. The horse arrived with the front legs separated from the base, which makes a nice rearing pose but tends to result in the poor brute snapping its back legs. Rather than risk calamity, I decided to put the pin in to hold the piece nice and firm. And I painted it black. Seemed the thing to do.
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| Hill Troll |
And finally, number three in todays paint challenge is the Hill Troll. Yes it is a Troll. No, he's no bigger than the usual 25mm figure. And that's correct, he appears to be armed with the kind of mallet you might have used to fix tent pegs with. What's that you ask? What is that in his left hand? Well, it's a mystery to me, although it does look like it might be a banana. I've painted both mallet and banana as iron just to give them a hint of menace: though how you can menace anyone with a banana I can't imagine (nor do I wish to be enlightened thank you).
For some reason this is a figure that often gets painted green, which I didn't much fancy and which didn't seem very true to The Lord of The Rings either. The skin texture is distinctive and I assume it represents a scaly hide covering the whole critter in a kind of scaly onesy. I mourn the lack of genitalia, but suspect I am alone in this respect.
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| He's so scaly |
In the end, I went with a brown drybrush keeping things fairly dark, followed by a bit of selective dry brushing with a lighter colour. I worked the face over to try and give it a slightly less cheerful countenance than that favoured by the sculptor. I have generally avoided dry brushing these old figures in favour of blending the paint, but in this case the skin texture just cried out for it. It's hard to think how else to tackle him to be honest.
I have a unit of twenty of these in the offing (this is a trial piece). Once they're finished, I think they'll have some battlefield presence despite the lack of colour. A dark presence admittedly. I suspect their leaders will approve.
I've been lucky enough to get a batch of these with their - let's call them hammers - intact. More often they come without, as the handle is very thin and prone to breaking. It's tempting to convert a unit up with proper sized weapons and shields, but I'm not going to carve up examples that have survived intact all these years. Give them their opportunity to wreak havoc I say.
