Painting the Cohorts

Hello again. Sorry for the delay, I got caught up with other things. But here is my info on how I painted my Cohort. Yes, folks, you now get to know what it looks like.

I painted my Easterlings to look exactly as they did in the amazing movies from Peter Jackson. This meant applying Shining Gold (which is now Gehenna's Gold) to the armor and Mithril Silver (which is now Runefang Steel) to the blades & arrow heads. What I did with the fabric is I painted all of it Scab Red (now Khorne Red), and I painted all leather items (from quivers to shield-patches) with Charadon Granite (now Stormvermin Fur) to make it darker than Grey but also lighter than Black (like in the movies). With the wood I chose Bestial Brown (which is now Mournfang Brown), and I painted the feathers with Blood Red (now Evil Suns Scarlet)

The New banner design I painted up with Blood Red and Sunburst Yellow (which is now Flash Glitz Yellow), and the metal Crescent on top I did with Shining Gold. The drummers I painted to have Bestial Brown mallets I gave my horses an enormous range of skin colors as well as Hoof-and-hair colors. I gave them such color schemes as Skull White (White Scar) skin with Chaos Black (Abaddon Black) hair, hooves, and spots; Dark Flesh (Doombull Brown) skin with Skull White hooves, hair, and spots; Codex Grey (Dawnstone) skin with Charadon Granite hooves, hair, and spots; all of the reverses; and even pure Codex Grey, pure Chaos Black, pure Bestial Brown, pure Skull White, pure Bubonic Brown (Zamesi Desert), and pure Fortress Grey (Administratum Grey), all with Dark Flesh hooves & hair.

This topic on horses brings me to my Variags. I decided that only the guys who were going to give Banner bonuses in War of the Ring mode needed banners. So, as you can see with these cavalrymen, I hacked off the banners with a hobby hacksaw (the next box [each box has 5 pewter cavalrymen] I will pick one to leave the banner on). I still need to bring over the three cavalry axemen from my former half-time house. But in the mean time, I will describe my color scheme and why I did painting this way. J.R.R. Tolkien describes the Variags as guys "who hated the sun". I swear that's all he says about what they look like. To reflect that, I decided to paint my Variags of Khand to have yellow armor via Sunburst Yellow (Flash Glitz Yellow), Skull White (White Scar) cloaks, and for some reason Scorched Brown feathers, wood & leather that I intend to re-paint with Blazing Orange (Troll Slayer Orange) leather, Macharius Solar Orange (Jokaero Orange) arrow-feathers, and Vomit Brown (Tau Light Ochre) wood. I painted their hands and faces completely Bleached Bone (Ushbati Bone), to represent gloves & to represent those masks that cover one's entire head except for the eyes and mouth.

Infantry version - colors shown here have changed since the taking of this photo.

As you can tell by all of these models, I have a special basing technique. That basing technique is explained below.

What I did to make the base was I basically took Citadel PVA glue and I brushed it over the top of each base and I dipped it top-first into Citadel modelling sand and when it dried I painted it with watered-down Bestial brown (but I ran out and had to use Calthan Brown and then Dark Flesh). When that dried, I applied Bubonic Brown as a thick highlight. When that dried, I applied a thin highlight of Bleached Bone. Once all of the paint was in place, I scattered some light dabs of PVA glue and applied Citadel Dead Grass to he scatter-spots. Then, I painted the rim Graveyard Earth.

That is all I have to discuss for now, next post will be about Easterling Charioteers I built from scratch and the post after that will be about what I did to include the unprofiled Eastern Kingdoms units: Keiseimu, Ravager of Ithilien; Easterling King; Queen Beruthiel; Dragon Guard (not to be confused with Dragon Knight or Black Dragon); and Easterling Siege Bow. Actually, there's going to be a  post in between those two about my inclusion of the profiled units Amdur, Lord of Blades; Easterling War Priest; and Easterling Dragon Knights.

Thank you for your time :-)

Beginning an Empire of Rhûn

I began Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings hobby with a box of 20 plastic Easterlings and a copy of the A Shadow in the East sourcebook. Since then, I have been a dedicated person to building an enormous army cohort, for the Men of the East. I have smiled as the Easterling army grew so enormously from then to now. In 2005, they were just swordsmen, archers, pikemen, kataphrakts, captains, and a Ringwraith named Khamûl, who is second among the Nazgûl and the only one of those nine that Tolkien actually named. Tolkien also gave the Easterlings chariots, but GW decided to give a group Tolkien wrote the least about of anything in his world, The Variags of Khand, the chariots. This meant I had to use the Khandish chariot rules whenever I wanted to included chariots (like I can't use chariot scythes). Then, in 2007, Legions of Middle-earth added a King unit, a Guard unit, and a Ballista unit to this faction. In 2009, a whole new mode called War of the Ring added a Drummer unit, a Shaman unit called the War Priests, a faction exclusive unit called the Dragon Knights, two named human Heroes called Amdûr, Lord of Blades and Queen Berúthiel; and the two Blue Wizards going by the names Nárandir and Súlrandir. Then came the Fallen Realms Sourcebook and four other Skirmish mode rewrite books, which translated the first four War of the Ring additions I mentioned above into Skirmish mode format, and also gave Warrior-level infantry and cavalry the option of becoming "Black Dragons", units with a +1 bonus to fight and courage, and who cost 2 extra points each.

I had also assembled an army of Minas Tirith and an army of Dale, a kingdom of Men just south of Gimli's home of the Lonely Mountain, starting each of these also with a couple boxes each of infantry and cavalry, so I had three factions of Humans that I could have started. It was a tough choice and I was even considering a Haradrim army as a fourth route, and was also thinking Dwarves. But then I re-watched the Easterling scenes from The Two Towers and from The Return of the King, and looked at the craftiness of each human army's uniform, and realized this "Warhosts" book I owned contained a Gondor article, and a Rohan article and Dwarves article (close enough, in my eyes, to Men of Dale) but nothing even that close to Men of Rhûn. Then my eyes fell on the phalanxes, Kataphrakts, and Charioteers offered by the Rhûn faction; and I decided: Easterlings it is.

Tomorrow I show some images while also discussing how I paint such an army.