Lord of the Rings Rohan

Well, I have just over a month to go before the Gathering in the Desert Lord of the Rings tournament. The only other LOTR tournaments I played in I used my Minas Tirith and had a blast; for this event, not only did I volunteer to do a terrain table of Osgiliath ruins, I decided I'd like to use it as motivation to finishing off one of the armies I had. I chose Rohan. As you can see from this first picture, I stll have a ways to go! I'm not just painting up the army I'll use in the tournament, but I'm painting the entire force. So there are more figures here than I'll be using in the event, but I won't have to worry about adding figures later to the army...though that may change when/if a Rohan book ever comes out. The "In Progress" figures include 10 archers, 10 hand weapon, 10 spear, dismounted Merry and both mounted and dismounted figures for: Theoden, Eomer, Eowyn, Gamling, Captain, Standard, and 6 Royal Guard.

The good news is that I'm done with the regular Riders of Rohan! I have 10 mounted archers and 20 mounted with throwing spears complete! I also have the horses done for the other mounted figures (except Gamling, Theoden and Eowyn). I oiled the horses and think they came out quite nice.

I did do some converting as I didn't have 20 throwing spear armed figures. I made spears out of brass wire and used them to replace hand weapons in some case, or to place behind shields on other figures to indicate they do indeed have throwing spears. I also did some other minor conversions like switching this figures sword for a hand axe.

Though this last picture didn't come out too well, I hope you can see that after the figure was done I went back and highlighted some of the cape, shield and metal. This added some nice contrast and it looks better in person than in these rushed pictures (I didn't take the time to set up my photobox today)...well, back to painting!