Painting a Moria Goblin Army

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I’ve been offline with the blog for a bit as I had an army to paint.

a couple months ago i agreed to go to a LOTR tournament the 1st weekend of July. Ive not played LOTR since the 2008 Grand Tournament, and did not have an army painted.

So my main reason to agree to go was a) i was keen to play some more LOTR and b) to motivate me to paint my army.

The Army:

I have two sets of LOTR armies, i have a Galadrim army but its all in boxes and on sprue and I have a bunch of Moria goblins, 12 of which were painted, and many of the rest were part way there, i had about 20 base coated in metal.

So i decided that was the army to finish.

I finished tidying up all the models i had to go, doing all the characters and the prowlers, and the trolls (there will be another post soon on some of the work i had to do for them) as well as basing them. I cleaned up and based a ton of plastic goblins, and had to buy the batswarms.

I converted up the two warg marauders from 2 fell wargs i got in a job lot, and had no use for.

Painting:

the good news is that the goblins are mostly metal so painting would be easy, i had also painted 12 of them previously and had remembered the paint scheme.

so the recipe was:

Spray entire model black then leadbelcher

Armour:

  1. Ink Nuln oil, then ink Agrax

  2. Drybrush silver

  3. Stipple Ryza Rust

  4. Dryrbrush silver.

Skin:

  1. Base death world forest

  2. Ink Athonian Camo Shade

  3. Highlight Elysium Green

  4. Highlight Ogryn green

Cloth:

  1. Base Steel Legion Drab

  2. ink agrax

  3. Highlight tallarn sand

  4. Highlight Karak stone

Bows and spears:

  1. dark brown or black

  2. drybrush red brown

  3. add lighter and dry brush again

Warpaint - Dark red, with lighter red inside for the red clothes i did a more detailed version of this, going higher on the red.

Eyes - Yriel Yellow

Trolls - for the trolls i painted them following a tutorial by Swords and Brushes on Youtube - im not great at more organic stuff so it was nice to have something to follow and get used to stippling and wet brushing.

Bats and wargs were a coal black, dry/wet brushed black brown and then lighter browns with a very light bone over the highest parts.

Bases:

I based coated with a artist jade green, then drybrushed a bone, and then a white, then inked a black/brown mix. you cannot always see the green but its there and more fun than the plain grey and black.

Results:

So i ended up with a lot more models painted than i needed. i knew i was not going to use 5 trolls, but wanted to paint them at once to save time.

i worked out my list with a few weeks to go, and then i miscounted so i had to paint 7 models two nights before the event, but goblins are fast.

So the good news is that i have over 80 models painted, and have 30-40 to go, and then i have more models than i will ever need, but i now have a painted army for Saga age of magic and other games.

Tournament:

I had fun, I played 3 games of 700 pts on day 1, with 2 draws and a loss, but i got back int eh swing. day 2 at 350 pts, i won my first 3 games and then missed out on a place by getting mirked in my last game, but its the way LOTR goes.

I can see why people use smaller armies, i found myself getting stuck on my own models and it took longer, so i could not bring the force strength to bear often but when i did it worked wonders.

will I play again? maybe, I don’t want to get used to tournaments, they take a lot out of me, and I don’t want to get back into it. i probably played 60 or more between 1997 and 2008 and ive played 3 tournies since, and i don’t want to change that much.

But it was fun and so i can see myself doing it again.

Photos - here you can see all the photos of the army so far.