Painting Terrain: The Land of Mordor

This post was migrated from my earlier blog:
Painting The Lord of the Rings Miniatures.


A Citadel base painted to look like the land of Mordor.In my last post, I explained how I detailed a grass-covered base. Keep in mind through this post that the techniques used here are just as useful on a large terrain board as they are on a tiny 25mm base. The basing style in the last post would probably not work so well on a large board, but rest assured that this one is (if anything) even better when applied to a huge terrain board.

This base is painted to look like the ash-wastes of Mordor, and so would be perfect for any evil army. Since I first used this technique on a large board, I bought large quantities of the colours needed from a hardware store. Because of this, a base painted with Citadel paints will be slightly different, but very few people will be able to tell any difference. Unlike most of my colour schemes, I didn’t actually come up with this one myself. This is something I learned from Chad Mierzwa in an article of White Dwarf.

How To Paint a Mordor Base

As always, I applied a black primer to the base. I then drybrushed certain areas with a 50/50 mix of The Fang and Abaddon Black, then with a lighter drybrush of pure The Fang. The places left black were drybrushed with a 50/50 mix of Steel Legion Drab and Administratum Grey.

The last step is to lightly drybrush the whole base with Administratum Grey. Note that I may have used slightly too much on this base. This is the equivalent of when I wash a miniature with Agrax Earthshade. A wash or drybrush applied to the entire piece is great for tying it all together and making it look like a single entity. When you do this step, feel free to get a little of this final drybrush on the feet of the miniature. This will make it look as though they’ve been traipsing through Mordor.

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