Painting Journeys in Middle Earth: Villains of Eriador

My father-in-law taught me the wonderful tradition of hiding your own presents under the Christmas tree. This year, I had a nice surprise from myself on Christmas morning: the Villains of Eriador expansion pack for Journeys in Middle Earth. I painted the core set back in September, and my two older boys and I enjoyed playing the Bones of Arnor campaign with Legolas, Gimli, and Bilbo. We knew we wanted to play again; in fact, my second son was ready to start another campaign the night after finishing the first. Knowing that Villains of Eriador adds three extra villain miniatures and a handful of cards, I set up a plan to get it around the holidays so we could get back into Middle Earth.

The Bones of Arnor campaign is free with the companion app, but the other available campaign is a separate purchase. I am mentioning that here because that makes me a little uneasy: separating out three villain figures for separate purchase and charging for a second campaign feels like nickle-and-diming the fans. I find myself curious about how this financial decision played out. I know as well as anyone that software costs money to make and maintain, but on the other hand, you're really buying access to the software whenever you buy the physical content as well. In some ways, it's not like the old days when you bought computing hardware and the software came with it—the days that gave rise to innovations like Unix and the Free Software Foundation.

As with the base set characters, I started by cleaning the miniatures. They were then prepared using zenithal priming from my airbrush.

The game expansion contains no illustrations for the three villains: they do not have any card representation in the game, unlike their spiritual predecessors Descent or Imperial Assault. There are a few threads about color schemes over on BoardGameGeek, and in one of them, I discovered that there is one illustration presumably of Gulgotar in the app, at the point where you choose your difficulty level. I grabbed a screenshot from the Steam version of the app, and I am including it here for other painters who might want quick access to it.

As you can see, Gulgotar has uncommon blue-tinted skin. For my figure, I decided to match this tone. There are two failed attempts under my third and final attempt. The others were too blue and too saturated: adding grey into the mixture helped. My color-matching attempts were both aided and frustrated by Sorastro's excellent video tutorial about this miniature. I didn't want to just copy his recipes, but in the end, I did copy his skin recipe pretty closely. Here is the result.

The first pass at Gulgotar was "clean" with no weathering, and it looked pretty sharp. That metallic girdle and the ... shoulder spikes? ... looked like they needed a little something, so I went in with some stippling of thin orange and browns. As I've said before, I still get very nervous about weathering, but I'm glad I did it here. The only part that stands out to me as incongruous is that the rusty effect on the blunt side of the sword is a bit too intense for the rest of the blade; I may yet go in and add a little more grime or, perhaps, stipple in a little more metallic.

I am happy with how his furs came out. I used a technique I learned years ago from Sorastro's Chewbacca and Ghaarkan video—a technique that has served me well. I mixed up shade and highlight tones and wet-blended them on the furs, and this effect was enhanced by the zenithal priming. Adding a wash of sepia and black ink brought all the colors together, and a modicum of manual highlighting finished the job.

I'll mention here that the figures were based using the same mixture as the base set: black tea, burnt grass fine turf, and medium green fine turf, followed by static grass after varnish. It is literally the same mixture, since I had some leftover in a little sealed plastic cup.

Here is Coalfang, on whom I used the same basic approach as described for the furs above but with much more manual highlighting. The first pass left him looking much too dark, but I was able to brighten him up considerably. It's a simply monochrome paint job, with a little blue washed into the shadows, but I don't think that really shows.

My commentary about Coalfang is another critique of how the expansion was packaged and sold, as well as how it relates to the DLC campaign. My sons and I started the second campaign last night, and it turns out (minor spoiler ahead) that Coalfang is introduced in the very first mission. Coalfang is described in text as being russet with black fangs. When I painted it, all I had to go with was "coal fang", which sounds to me like it should be black, not potato-colored. We enjoyed the first mission, but I couldn't help but be a little miffed that I spent hours on this wolf with no color guidance, and then the first thing we find tells me that it doesn't match the designer's vision. I don't know if anyone from Fantasy Flight will come across this post or not, but seriously: consider your painters.

As I told my boys last night, I could always repaint it. I'm not real keen on it, though. [UPDATE: But I did. See below.] It's already varnished and flocked. To reprime it, I'd have to strip it or peel away the flocking; to paint it again by hand I'd have to cover all the black and revarnish. Pride is probably not worth it when I have plenty of other figures to paint, and monochrome wolves aren't really as exciting as some other things in the queue.

This is Atarin. (Minor spoilers ahead.) Now, if you've played the Bones of Arnor, you may be surprised that this is Atarin. The figure is not quite how Atarin is described in the campaign text. I don't know if he shows up in armor and a cape in the paid campaign or not, but it is definitely jarring compared to Bones of Arnor.

In any case, one of the BGG threads I mentioned previously commented that the armor could fit a silver-black-red paint scheme, going with the idea that he's a Numenorian Nazgul. He was pretty straightforward to paint after this decision. The dark areas are a mix of black and deep sea blue, and the silver is a mix of regular paints with my Vallejo Metal Air Silver. P3 Armor Wash added some depth to the shadows of the armor. The cape was basecoated in red with the shadows and highlights painted in with two-brush blending. There are some parts of the figure that could be interpreted as leather, around the belt and what look like pouches, but I decided to keep all of these black anyway to maintain a stark, three-color effect.

If you look at his face, you can see that the figure actually has a nose and lips sculpted inside the helmet. I painted these, because it seemed like the right thing to do. It's a bit silly, though: black, silver, red... and a little bit of a pink nose. One could paint the face jet black and have a more sinister effect, more in keeping with a ringwraith rather than a dude in fancy armor.

There's a family photo of the three villains. Gulgotar was clearly the most fun and interesting one to paint, while the other two are more like palette explorations. Still, it's always fun to bring out a special miniature at a climactic moment in a board game, so I'm glad to have them. Coincidentally, I'm posting this on the day that Fantasy Flight Games is announcing the new big-box expansion to Journeys in Middle Earth, and from the discussion I've seen about it, I'll say they have my number.

Thanks for reading!

UPDATE:

We are a few sessions into the campaign now, and the dissonance between the description of Coalfang in the app and my paint job was just too much for me.

Coalfang Revised

Coalfang Revised

She's now properly russet with black fangs and claws. I also repainted the undamaged eye to be red, to match the other wargs, although I gave her a yellow pupil where the others had none. Her left eye looks more deadened by contrast with the red one, which I think is a subtle win. I was able to redo the thick tufts of fur fairly quickly, and I spent much more time on the lighter brown areas. Some paint ended up on the rocks, of course, so they were touched up pretty heavily.