Re-painting Isengard (Nov WIP)

"Build me an army, worthy of Mordor"

Though I began earlier this year working on my Easterlings, the first army I am planning on getting painted up fully is my Isengard force. This is mostly because I'm quite happy with the base colours (it just needs highlights and touching up), I don't need to buy anything else for the force as its around 1000 points already, and Saruman is one of my favourite characters so he kinda gets preferential treatment.

The previous incarnation of this army (with some really awful blurry photos to boot) had a slightly different composition to how it stands now. Notably missing is one of the trolls and the unit of orcs which I have moved over to my fledgeling Mordor army. However, I have replaced them with some Uruk-Hai warriors I fixed up, a demolition team I forgot I owned, and a while ago I picked up a version of Saruman on foot and Grima Wormtongue. While I have no plans on expanding this force, if I were I'd probably want to add some Warg Riders for cavalry, possibly put some orcs back in there for cheap bodies, and crossbowmen for more shooting.

The main things I have done in repainting this army is taking away nearly all the red that was previously there. I wanted to make my Isengard force quite dark and grungy, as well as making it distinct from the other evil armies that come more directly under the thrall of Sauron which will feature red quite predominantly. This included removing red from the clothes of my Dunlendings, and repainting the flesh of my Uruk-Hai to remove any reddish tint. The only other big repainting I'm doing is Saruman himself who will be much brighter with less severe shading as I think I can do a much better job at painting him now than five years ago.

There's still lots to do in order to achieve the look I'm going for, in particular I will have to spend quite a bit of time working on re-applying white hands to quite a few of the miniatures who previously had them on their faces. However, I'm hoping that this project wont end up taking too much time and I'm aiming to have it finished by Christmas whereafter my Mordor army will become my main focus. My Mordor force will be comparable in size to my Isengard army but requires much more work.

Here's a bonus quick pic of the small Rohan force that I'm cobbling together as well. As you can see from the range of different coloured bases, these miniatures have served in quite a few other projects previously and I was actually surprised at how many I was able to pull together for this project. I've got 5 riders, 12 warriors with a decent mix of weapons, 4 royal guard, and hero-wise I've got Eowyn, Merry, and Hama. With the addition of the contents of the Battle of Pelannor Field box and a few more heroes I think this should end up as a solid 1000-ish points force.

Non-LOTR stuff is taking up most of my painting time at the moment, but now my Kill Team is finished I hope to really get going on my Isengard and Rohan armies while I finish off my Talons of the Emperor who just need tidying up and basing now.