More Knights of Minas Tirith

Ok, so I know a lot of folks are looking for more historic figures and games... and I am sure it probably looks like all I do is Lord of the Rings.... I promise to get more/different pictures up soon enough. When I am done with the Knights of Minas Tirith, I will be moving on to some SAGA Crescent & Cross 4 point Milites Christi Warband. More on that later.


So far, I have gotten the Knights' bases scraped and re-flocked in gravel and now repainted. I have decided to repaint the Knights one at a time. You can see one of my original knight next to one that is almost complete in the lower picture

 

I had a hard time "muting" down the bright shiny silver used to paint the knights.... You can see in the lower picture that I managed to dull the armor down to my desired color using a blend of GW black and IWM Steel. I thinned the paints down as I didn't want to have to strip the figures and I also didn't want to lose any details... the end result worked, but it took a little time.


One of the changes I decided to do was to go back and make my original Knight's lances black... this will match the new knights and help blend them to appear to have come form the same artist. It also stepped up their appearance as "Knights".

One thing I had to deal with though is the different painting styles here. My horses were originally all painted darker brown, while the new ones are all lighter "dun" in color, Khaki even. The same can be said for the unit's entire paint pallet. I had to go in and change each item to match closer to my original paint jobs... the swords had to go from bright "GW Blazing gold" to a more muted bronze/gold. Even the tack and harness had to be darkened.... I chose to keep the lighter horse color though to add in some variety. I also plan to go in and add socks to some horses of each color.

They came out fairly decent enough in the end. I absolutely love IWM Silver and Steel!





I have to admit though, I used a lot more static grass and tufts on these five than I did on the original ones. It wasn't until I was done that I realized... I hadn't repainted the tack and harnesses black like the others.... some folks would leave it as that distinguishes a second "unit", but I wanted them all looking the same, so I opened up the paint and went about making them all uniform.

A lot more static grass and tufts from Army Painter.

It didn't take long and I am glad I noticed before I had sealed them in matt varnish!





All together they look like a nice solid unit!

Sealing the knights & priming a dino for Ghost Archipelago.

I am glad that I made them all match as together, they look like a very nice unit! Just think... only six more to go... the plastics..... all with pennants and shields. I think however, that I will take a break from them though and work on a Mumakil.. I found one in the flea market at HMGS Historicon 2017.

It was in rough shape and was missing the lower parts to the Howdah, but it was very nicely customized with armor plating..... More importantly, the price was right. I will work with some green stuff to cover the lower Howdah attachment holes and I will also change the color from steel grey to the more visible red fabric. I am thinking I need to add some tusk weapons too! We shall see.... It will be a project to say the least.

It was rather dusty from being in storage, but nothing I couldn't work with. Since it will require a lot of work, I opted to start with the top of the Howdah and will do it section by section and then work my way down to the elephant. The elephant body and plasti-card armor was very nicely done... the harness and ropes will all have to be repainted as they were only very "roughly" painted/base coated.

 

A lot of customization went into this beastie and I plan to do it justice and get it finished up nicely! You can see the unfinished model above and a great view of the armor that was added... it has a LOT of potential and yes, I have the ear. When I am done, it will match my other Mumakil and my painting/modeling style.