I finally finished painting the first units for War of the Ring. I started with the basic Gondor units.

Before I started this whole ‘project’, I had to make some basic and important decisions. I wanted the game to be better playable by making the different colours of the different nations stand out (dark blue for Gondor, dark green for Rohan, brown for the Dwarves, etc.). The game had to become more functional. There were three ways to handle that:
1. Paint the clothes and/or shields, flags and heraldry in the nation’s predominant colour.
2. Paint the clothes, armour, shields, flags and heraldry in the colours that Tolkien intended (and if in doubt or when there’s no description: use the colours that are used in Peter Jackson’s movie). Only paint the bases in the nation’s colour.
3. A mix of 1 and 2.

I quickly discarded option 3. It would be much too confusing, and not very logical. I opted for 2. I wanted to stick to Tolkien’s lore as much as possible and I could only do that if I painted the bases in the nation’s colour for functionality and paint the rest according to the lore.

So here’s Gondor. Gondor was a bit of a problem. The rangers of Gondor wore dark green, but the armies of the other units was a bit more unclear. The board game doesn’t have Gondor rangers, so I opted to paint all the different Gondor units in the Gondor Royal Guard scheme: pitch black, with a black shield and black flag, depicting the white tree. The armour parts clean, industrial, city-like shiny.

Before:

Gondor basic units unpainted

After:

Gondor basic units painted

Only thing left to do is putting some varnish on.

The statistics
Type: Gondor basic units
Amount: 15
Time spent: around 40 hours
Paints:
- primed with ‘The Army Painter’ base primer matt black
- metal parts: drybrushed with Citadel boltgun metal, then drybrushed with Citadel chainmail, then washed with Citadel badab balck wash, highlights with Citadel mithril silver
- fleshy parts: painted with P3 midlund flesh, then washed with P3 flesh wash
- base: Citadel regal blue
- heraldry: brandless acryllic white paint
- wood: brandless acryllic brown paint
- sword sheath: Citadel bestial brown
- cloth: highlighted with a mix of brandless acryllic black paint with a bit of Citadel regal blue