MESBG: Rohan Battle Company

This is a project I did last year, and the rest of my Battle Company projects would sadly have to take a backseat to other things in my life.

The Lord of the Rings is by far the most influential franchise of my childhood. The books absolutely blew my mind as a child and made me realize how incredible reading can be. The movie trilogy is still my favorite to this day, and I regularly rewatch them each year. It's no wonder then that 'The Two Towers' box for the Lord of the Rings miniatures game was my entry into the tabletop hobby.

I vividly remember standing in front of my (tiny) local Games Workshop and staring at the Uruk-Hai and Rohan miniatures in the window display. The box was insanely expensive for me at the time, but it was more than worth it, for it opened the door to this beautiful hobby.
I wasn't yet aware that I was colorblind, so I didn't realize that it wasn't normal to not see the difference of the Scorched Brown Uruk-Hai skin on the Chaos Black primer. The GW employee that taught me the basics of painting truly had the patience of a saint.

A lot of the minis never ended up being painted, but I still have all of them to this day. Basically every rider of Rohan has snapped at the horse ankle and a lot of Uruk-Hai lances broke off, but most of it could be fixed, and they would be ready for paint again.

The minis for this battle company are actually from the Pellenor Fields box, but they are still the same old sculpts from all these years ago. The lack of detail really becomes apparent when you compare them to more modern minis.

The 25mm scale makes it harder as it is, but I actually found a lot of faults in the lotr minis I have. Faces that are only detailed on one side and look like a deformed mass of plastic on the other. Just a lot of clean up work in general. I don't mind scraping mold lines, I actually find it quite relaxing, but you can't rescue detail if there is no detail in the first place.

With that in mind, I decided to give them a 'table ready' look and didn't worry too much about any missed detail or too many (if any) highlights. I could spend ages on these faces, and they would still look like they suddenly decided to follow Nurgle in Rohan.

As you can see, it's all very basic. Mostly a base color, wash, and maybe a drybrush or highlight here and there.
The green of the cloaks is a bit too bright for my taste, but it was the only green spray primer I had at hand, and it saved me a lot of time.

The rest is just various brown tones and a bit of metal detail. The flowers on the base are actually there to help me recognize who is who. White flowers are for 'heroes', while yellow flowers are for normal soldiers.
You can't pose most lotr minis, and you'll end up having several of the same figure in your battle company. Unless you have the name written on the base, you'll have a hard time differentiating them on the table.

I don't yet know how (and if) I will be able to show the progression of the battle company on the individual models, once they have gained more experience and/or gathered some equipment.