paintingI got my first 3 Uruk-Hai painted, along with their big buddy Lurtz. I'm actually rather proud of myself, since I bought and painted them in only a week or two. Most of my figures are still unpainted and older than a year. And these are IMHO some of the best figures I've painted. Once I get some pictures, maybe I'll post them. Uruks aren't very colorful, being mostly browns and metal, but I think these guys look properly menacing.
Partly, I was successful because Uruks are very easy to paint, but I did take the opportunity to try out some more advanced painting tricks like highlighting and such. I used to think that highlighting required drybrushing, and I have always been miserably unsuccessful at using drybrushing for highlighting. I can drybrush for "dusting" and rough coloring effects (like drybrushing metalic over black for a "worn out" feeling), but the nice highlighting effect eluded me.
Well, that's because you shouldn't drybrush for highlighting, or at least I shouldn't. Just literally paint lines on the surfaces you want to highlight, like the edges of a cloak, cheek bones, etc.
You'd think I would have figured this out after years of painting, but I'm not always very smart. At any rate, I think I may have finally "leveled up" in miniatures painting. We'll see if I can carry the new technique on to other models successfully. I have a lot of Spaniards that require my attention. :-)
I have 3 more Uruk Hai warriors on order at the FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Store). They give 10% discounts there, which cuts the tax and a bit off. That's handy, since I'm a bit of a metal biggot when it comes to figures. The problem is that GW charges about twice what everyone else charges for their figures. I know part of it is having to pay Tolkien licences, and part of it is keeping a really huge publicly held company afloat, but it's still painful to pay over 3 bucks for a "rank and file" miniature, and 10 bucks for a "character".
The GW solution for cheaper figures is to buy plastic figures. These look pretty good, but don't have the heft of real metal. Some people put weights in their bases to make them feel more like metal figures, but I just don't like plastic as much. Unfortunately, they're pretty reasonably priced at around a dollar a figure. So I can pay $25 bucks or $80 to get a company of 24 figures. I know I don't have an extra $65 sitting around, so either I have to forego metal, or resign myself to never having many figures in my LOTR collection.
What's working in my favor is that currently I'm only collecting figures for Battle Companies. Battle Companies is another way to play the LoTR game, where each player gets a half dozen figures or so, and fights them in a series of campaigns in which they can level up, etc. Sort of like playing a role playing game, but just for miniature combat.
So I'll go ahead and get my battle company figures in metal, since I can take the time to try to "do them justice", and if I get into real army building, I'll use plastics.
Repeat after me, "I'm not an adict, it's cool..."
