I’ve started painting figures from GW’s Battle of the Five Armies boxed game. I started with the Wolves and Goblin Warg Riders because I like dogs, and find them easy to paint.  The four units of Wolves and four units of Goblin Warg Rider cavalry represent just under 1/3 of the figures in the Battle of Five Armies box.

These are 10mm miniatures, quite a bit smaller than my 15mm DBA armies.  This is the scale where sane people stop shading anything and resort to block colors with black lining between them.  The results are quite reasonable at normal playing distance (arm’s length), but as seen in the pictures here, they’re not meant for closeups.

These are plastic figures, and the shape of the wolves is exactly the same as the 28mm Warhammer wolves.  All of the plastics are modelled at 4x scale or larger, and then they somehow shrink them down when making the molds.  The figures lose some detail on the top and bottom, since there can’t be any undercuts in the mold, but leaving black primer there hides the defect well enough.

The main complaint I have about the figures themselves is the fact that the poses are all identical.  They’re packed tightly onto the bases and you can’t get much variation in their position.  As far as accuracy goes: the wolves and wargs are the same models, unfortunately.

I’ve heard a theory that Tolkien’s Wargs are actually Andrewsarchus Mongoliensis.  This makes sense from a morphological perspective, and I enjoy the idea and its possible implications. Although it’s hard to interpret the intent of the author when it comes to fictional works, I think that once a book is written, the interpretation of the reader is far more important than the intent of the author.  Stories that stand the test of time will inevitably suffer no end of interpretations inconsistent with the author’s designs, but they will survive them all.

However, I’ve also decided that I don’t really enjoy painting these 10mm guys.  It’s not hard, despite how small they seem, and it’s impressive how little paint it takes to make a figure look painted if you’re leaving black lines between the block colors.  But it’s a very tedious, repetitive process.  Watching (listening to?) the olympics helped a lot, but that’s over now.

I’ve finished painting the goblin infantry as well, but they aren’t all based yet, because I ran out of metal 40mm x 20mm bases until I got more tonight at Legions. That leaves “the good guys” and leaders.  I’ve started the elves, but haven’t gotten very far on them yet.