Botwt's Hobby Blog

My first army in Lord of the Rings SBG was my Gondor/Minas Tirith army. I started out with the Return of the King set that gave me 24 warriors and then added on from there. Well after several years of collecting I’ve managed to rid myself of all the plastic armored Gondor units and now I have nothing left but metal pieces (and a few plastic rangers). Here is a sample of a few of my models for that army.

The way I tried to paint the armor was fairly simple…I like the look of NMM, but I cannot seem to be able to pull it off very well, so I took a different approach. I painted the armor all grey, washed it with a very watered down black and then finally highlighted the raised bits of armor with Boltgun Metal (GW) and Chainmail (GW).

The bases are a simple rubble look to resemble the ruins of Osgiliath or the siege of Minas Tirith (like the whitish rock I painted for Faramir’s base). My Rangers of Gondor however ended up with dirt and grassy bases…not sure why I did this, but I may revisit this decision like I did for my ranger version of Faramir.

I also had to have Boromir in this army, and when I started LotR SBG it was right after The Two Towers was released and Boromir in his Gondorian armor was a must for me. However there wasn’t an official model yet or any rules for him. I set about converting my own out of a spare Elendil model I had laying about. After butchering my Boromir for his head, horn and shield and decapitating Elendil I came up with this piece to lead my Gondorian troops to victory. I must say it is a hell of alot nicer that the official GW release…and he is tall like he is supposed to be.

Hobbits are just awesome (to me anyway) and Peregrin Took was a must have, and being the way that I am I had to add that touch of ‘something’ to my model. I removed his helmeted head and replaced it with the head from one of the other Pippin models and came up with this.

So now I am working on another conversion of Beregond…not that I am unhappy with the one shown above in the first photo, but when I saw the Gondor commander in the set I purchased all I could think of was…Citadel Guard. Another option for this conversion might be to create Irolas, a character Peter Jackson created for the Return of the King film.

I still need to remove this model’s head and attach the bow arm…the other thing is the orc is going to have to go. I think I’ll end up having him stand on a stone instead.

So that is my basic Gondor army without my fiefdom allies I have hanging in the wind.