Amon Hen and Some

My latest terrain piece is a popular one, the Amon Hen lookout post from the finale of the Fellowship of the Ring or the scene of the breaking of the Fellowship. Yeah I am on a Lord of the Rings binge of late, with huge turnout for our local Bilbo's Birthday Bash, just about a month away, I am busy toiling away in basement late night. . (like blogging at 1:25am) Between trying to finish painting the army, doing a display base, getting some practice games in, getting the films on Blu Ray last month and talk about making the Five Armies battle happen, its an easy thing to go binge on.

The Amon Hen piece came about as I was working on some new boards mainly for Ancients gaming, I am using alot of new landscaping materials from Woodland Scenics, I haven't really used before so I wanted a small test piece to try some stuff out, before I started landscaping the larger boards. somewhere along the way during that train of thought, I spoke to my pal Jeff and we talked about getting a game bringing his Isengard over and throwing down (this coming Tuesday.) or whatever reason while Isengard often makes folks think of the epic fight at Helm's Deep, It always makes me think of Amon Hen.

The Hirst blocks were already all cast, so all I really did here was build the hill out of Pink Foam.I worked up and built the basic design based by looking at the scene in the film and other peoples models. I wanted it to be playable, so I cut the design down a bit reducing the pillars to two so the was more room...I also made the model slight larger than some of the others I have seen, It just felt right when I start putting models next to it. The Seeing seat was the biggest challenge. I wanted to keep it simple. I cut the birds out with scroll saw and only used three instead of four as it just worked better. if your accustomed to detail work with a scroll saw, if was very easy, I wished I used a different material then MDF because it takes paint for shit..but this was meant to be a quickie project so I just went with it.

The fun new part was the landscaping, using the plaster rock molds and weathering pigment en masses was new for me. There is very little paint here, the building was sprayed Denheb Stone, the ground Brown and the rocks painted white..everything else here is weathering pigments except for some quickie drybrushing on the square edges at the very end to highlight...that's it done...I think from conception to completion may 10 hours since..Sunday. the bulk if being Sunday Night. Well get some good use out of it Tuesday as Mordor fights Isengard..in a 600 point practice game.

Speaking of my Cirith Ungol force, a couple quick pics of my Shelob, I spent alot of time on this model, from the posing, to re-modeling the face...(I think my model was miscast or something, I got it used and the face looked really weird..so I went to work on the scar tissue and proper remaining eyes) to the painting,. alot of washes, highlight, washes..repeat- going on...you can not really tell from these photos but while she looks "black" its really dark dark blues and purples mixed up from a black base..I want to give here a little more color than the standard Black/Red/Grey highlight I have seen with this model. when I unpack the photo tent to shoot my Vikings I'll take a couple more clearer shots. Mordor Orcs are a tough army to make "pop" appearance wise due to the dark and cruddy tones that fit the themes, hopefully my characters will at least jump out a bit over the horde of plastic orcs I have on the bench.

Okay So besides my LotR binge, we got a Hail Caesar Campaign kicking off soon, and Ancients Armies also getting painted, and probably some Warmachine going on, in the next couple weeks, good times.