This post was migrated from my earlier blog:
Painting The Lord of the Rings Miniatures.
I just finished painting the well in Balin’s tomb and I felt the urge to take a picture of it for the blog. Beside the terrain feature can be seen Grôblog, a few Moria Goblin spearmen and a trapdoor I painted earlier. I know it’s not much, but I really am working on a few new miniatures and they’ll be done soon. In the meantime, I’ll explain how I painted the stonework of the well, Grôblog’s pillar and the trapdoor.
All three pieces of grey stone are easy to paint and use the same simple formula. Interestingly, the last step is the most important and really makes it look like a rock. The technique can be used on anything, so long as it’s made of rock, so it’s good to know it. It starts with a basecoat of Stormvermin Fur, which makes a good starting point for any colour of stone I’ve tried.
After the basecoat had dried (which doesn’t take long), I washed the stone several times with Agrax Earthshade. During this step, I made sure to focus the pigment heavily in the recesses of the rock, such as the cracks and other deep places. I repeated this step until it was suitably tenebrous, particularly on the inside of the well. That step took by far the longest, and once that had dried, I heavily drybrushed the outside of the well with Mechanicus Standard Grey. Only a small amount was drybrushed on the inside, but it made all the difference. For this step I used mainly a very large brush, but for the hard-to-reach places, I used a regular old drybrush. I avoided the really deep areas so as not to flatten the look of the stone.
Next, I drybrushed Dawnstone using the larger brush, but less heavily than the previous colo
ur. I got no paint on the inside of the well and very little in the deep spots. I then applied an even lighter drybrush of Administratum Grey, then used the smaller brush to apply a very faint final drybrush of Praxetti white to only the most exposed areas. As I said earlier, this last step is very important and makes the model look just like stone.
This simple technique can be used with different colours, but when painting stone the final highlight should almost always be white. I have found that this formula makes stone an easy and enjoyable thing to paint.
Thank you for reading my latest post. Good day.