To seek the pale enchanted gold

We still had the last group of dwarves, here they are!

The only thing we know about Bifur, Bofur and Bombur's attires is that 'they hung up two yellow hoods and a pale green one'. Tricky colours, never easy to make them work properly. Never mind, in this case I was far more concerned about the characters themselves and their designs. Let me show what I did and why.

 

The same but not the same

 

Bifur... Well. Nothing wrong per se about the general concept. I could work with what I had... more or less. But sorry, sir Peter, a character with an axe stuck on his skull, who doesn't speak a single word of Westron and barely communicates in Khuzdul isn't really a good idea. You don't make the character interesting, you make him confusing for the viewer. I just removed the axe tip and replaced it with some hair.

 

A mane indeed he has!

Once again, the hood is greenstuff

 

Regarding Bofur... Oh, where to start. Long story short, I would have been happy with just a hood, not that weird hat. I kept the braids, and now that I see them again, I'm beginning to regret...

At least he has a hood now

May add some stuff here?

 

Finally Bombur... Oh Bombur... I really disliked his beard. All about his facial hair, to be fair, but I really didn't see a feasible way to remove the braided beard, so I simply greenstuffed the beard and hair. I should have sculpted the hood on, but I finally didn't. Hmm.

This was all I could do

I should have done a bigger hood for that head!

 

So this is what I did to the group, you can see the three of them here:

Ready to join Thorin's Company!

 

 Bonus piece! The box also included Radagast the Brown. I'll spare my opinion about what they did to him in the movies (but... seriously, sir Peter? Seriously?). Sooo I had to do some work on the hat (focal point for the mini) and the cloak and robes (the rest of the mini).

 

Radagast the Maia, one of the Istari. He really deserved better

Not that I pretend to be saving the day, but at least I tried not to make him Radagast the hobo

You can be the Tender of Beasts and still keep some dignity

Now this is it, the full Thoin's Company (and Radagast!):

 

Now they look ready to kick that Smaug out of his lair

 

As I said at the beginning, not that I'm claiming to have he 'right' view about the dwarves, but on the whole I humbly think some improvements have been made. I hope Aulë is happy :D

The box also includes some cool scenery which I still have to paint and some ugly Goblins which most certainly I won't use as Middle Earth Goblins. Still on their sprues, but I believe they can look nice with some guns and stuff, some kind of post-apoc creatures from the Waste. I'm still not sure of what will I do with them, but that's a possibility. For the moment this is all I have to give out of the box, I still have lots of ongoing projects and some more boardgames to review. But some day I'll put my hands again on the box, one day...

We must away ere break of day

New dwarves all along!

This bunch made me sweat a little bit. Not for the complex conversions (most of them are quite subtle, if any), but for deciding the colours. When Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin and Gloin make their entrance in Bag End, the only thing we know of them is that "very soon two purple hoods, a grey hood, a brown hood and a white hood were hanging on the pegs, and off they marched with their broad hands stuck in their gold and silver belts". And that's it all.

I made some choices that I later regretted (and eventually had to correct!). Let me explain. I chose to firstly paint Gloin just like in the movie. Given the above narration, the different colours could match any of the dwarves. Painting it this way made a theme with his son Gimli...

 

Incredibly blurry phone pic

 

But I soon realized this one wouldn't belong to my project. Not at all. This was nor about recreating the movies, but making these dwarves look like in the book. So I took this one apart for a moment and begun to do things right. I assigned each colour to the corresponding dwarf according to the order they appear. My inner peace needed that.

So Dori wears purple

The only conversion is the greenstuff hood

Nori required a little bit hairdoing. Sorry, can't stand his looks in the movies...

 

I'm becoming a hairstylist!

And of course he wears purple too

Greenstuff hood again

Ori was most probably the biggest 'nay' for me of all of the dwarves. His goatee without moustache, his dumb aspect... the slingshot! No way, sorry, production team, no way!

So I took the spare kit of arms belonging to Thorin (with his original sword before he gets Orcrist)

Much better for my inner peace again

He certainly looks different now!

Wearing a grey hood

The three of them!

Oin and Gloin required no conversion work (apart from extending Oin's beard a little), I could work with these:

Brown hood, as expected

No further attention needed!

Aaaaand I came back on Gloin. Of course you can guess by now... White hood it is! So I simply repainted part of the mini...

 

Same concept, different colour

The white dwarf. Not the GW one, you know

Ooops! I need to repaint that base!

 

Well, these were a little hurdle, you know, but I finally managed to dodge it! Just the final group left... They will come in a few days too!

To dungeons deep and caverns old

A few more minis from this crazy project. These ones are almost unmodified, as I already liked the original designs.

First one would be Dwalin, the first member of the Company Bilbo meets at Bag End. "It was a dwarf with a blue beard tucked into a golden belt, and very bright eyes under his dark green hood". I like the aspect Dwalin has in the movies, that tough warrior look, I think it works fine for the purposes of the story. So I just made his beard a little bit longer and added a hood to his cloak.

 

Still in the movie style

I also kept the colour scheme:

 

Grrr, angry dwarf!

Awful hood scupted there

 

I even tried to replicate the tattoos on the head, these add some character to the guy.

 

Stress on tried to replicate

 

The next one Bilbo got to meet was Balin, Dwalin's brother, "a very old-looking dwarf with a white beard and a scarlet hood". Once again, I do believe the movie makes quite a good work on this one, so I just added a hood to the cloak, as before, as well as removed the spikes on the point of the sword, they looked kinda weird to me, not functional for a weapon of this kind.

 

Less is more

 

I also like the embroided trimming of the cloak, it speaks of a noble dwarf, not just a wanderer, but somebody important to his people who dresses accordingly, the dwarf who some day will become king under the mountain by his own right.

 

Marching to a quest always in style.

Now that I look at it, some more trimming on the cloak itself would have been nice too

 

Well, so these two work fine, so I had no need of any heavy converting work. This is the original...

 

 

And this is my result:

They are brothers, promise. You may be thinking of the 'Twins' movie...

 

As I'm with these almost unconverted guys, I'll keep it that way with the two non-dwarf characters in the Company, Bilbo and Gandalf. Two minis that didn't need any work on them, they both are sweet and nicely detailed.

Mr. Baggins

Gandalf the Grey

As you can see, I'm keeping it close to the movies. As I told last week, this is all about concepts and designs, not about the movies themselves or the characters during the story. But what I hope is that anyone reading the book could identify the dwarves and see them related to the original Tolkien's writings.

Still working on more dwarves, coming soon!

Far over the misty mountains cold

This project was a New Year's resolution. I'm coming to it by the end of May, so cool, kinda as scheduled :S

Well, sarcasm apart, I was really looking forward to this. After the Hobbit movies I had a lot of mixed feelings. I'm not going back to the dispute about a trilogy, the narrative rhythm or how much the movies go far away from the book. Many people have already written about that and I cannot bring anything new to the subject.

What I'm going to do is just about the concepts surrounding the characters. I'm aware that building up thirteen different characters and giving each one of them a distinctive appearance is quite an endeavour, specially if they all are dwarves (of course it's 'dwarves', not 'dwarfs'!). Once again, I'm not going into the movie thing about if that one deserved more attention or if you ended three movies without being able to recognise which character was each one. I'm tempted to do so, but I'm already disgressing...

The movies perform a major effort to make dwarves believable. You have to strip them out of the fantasy/cartoon appearance and make some actual humans fit in costumes and prosthetics. And they have to look like the real deal. They succeed in that, I think. But I'm afraid I don't like some of the designs. Not at all. I have maximum respect for concept artists; there are lots and lots of hours and creativity behind any scenery, any character or any piece of gear. But I think that some of the decisions which finally made their way into the movies don't work as well as others. Sorry, but dwarves without beards or trying to recover Erebor with a slingshot is more than I can peacefully bear.

That takes me to the minis! Finally! I got the Escape from Goblin Town box last year (there was a nice offer and I took it). I got it with a clear idea in mind: trying to make the dwarves a little bit closer to the book than how they are depicted in the movie. I will respect most of the work, as the minis are nicely sculpted and detailed, but I'll try to, at least, make every dwarf have a beard and a hood!

Grumpy grown guys with beards and hoodies... Hmmm... that scaringly fits my own description!

Let's begin with Thorin, son of Thráin, son of Thrór, king under the Mountain.

The conversion here is going to be quite simple. Sir Peter Jackson stated that he wanted a young leading character for cinematic purposes. Hence the choice of actor and characterization. But in the book, Thorin Oakenshield is quite a venerable Dwarf lord, mature (if I recall it correctly, on the edge of the two hundred years), I really thought he deserved another appearance.

 

With his new beard he looks like Gandalf

 

In the book Thorin wears a sky-blue hood with a long silver tassel. So let's try a mighty, old, imposing warrior in sky-blue...

 

Still looking like Gandalf :D

The hood and the tassel

 

As I've begun with Thorin, let me show his nephews next. Fili and Kili. Kili, the dwarf with no beard; a detail included solely for romantic purposes. Apparently you can't write a romance story if there is a bearded guy involved. Well, Sir Peter, if you had to choose, maybe (just maybe) you should have kept the beard and forget about the lame love story.

 

A dwarf has a beard. Just by definition

 

We know that they both wore "blue hoods, silver belts and yellow beards; and each of them carried a bag of tools and a spade".

I find Fili's pose forced. Should have corrected that. Hm.

Fili's bag has a runic 'F'. All greenstuff and sticks. Also removed Kili's bow

 

Well, this is it for today. Now you know more or less what to expect from this project. I have already finished the conversion work on all of them and I'm painting the dwarves by batches, I'll be showing them as I finish the groups. I hope you like this approach, all thoughts are welcome!