Mordor characters

Following on from my post at the weekend about Lord of the Rings orcs here are some of my recently completed Mordor characters. Again, I tried to stay true to the film in my choice of colours. Apologies for the blurry pictures but these guys are very hard to photograph.

First up is Shagrat, I went for very dark, almost black skin. This was painted VMC Black-Brown and highlighted by adding increasing amounts of Kommando Khaki.

and his rival, Gorbag.

Here is Grishnak. I’m very pleased with how he turned out. I tried to capture the blotchy red skin tone from the film. This was achieved by glazing the skin with very thin Scab Red and applying small patches of thinned Dark Flesh and VMC Black-Red.The effect is subtle but I think it works quite well. I may try it again on some future orcs I have lined up for painting.

These guys aren’t exactly Mordor characters but it seemed fitting to include them here. Frodo and Sam disguised as orcs. These models were really enjoyable to paint; really characterful, fun models.

That’s all for now. I hope you like them.

Orcs!

After reading an article in Empire magazine about the forthcoming hobbit films I’m very much excited again about the world of Middle Earth and its denizens.  As such I have begun repainting a lot of my old LotR models which I bought back when they were originally released a decade ago. In that time my painting has greatly improved and so I decided to update them.

Here are my orcs. I wanted them to be as close as possible to the film. However, the orcs in the film are all muddy and filthy and, while this looks great on film, it doesn’t really translate well onto miniatures without making them look like a badly painted mess. Instead I wanted to capture the feel of the orcs by using lots of dark colours and muted shades with the occasional red accent to add a bit of colour. Overall I’m very pleased with how these turned out.