The Battle of the Five Armies with Hordes of the Things

 

Over the past few months, I assembled and painted up a set of Hordes of the Things matched forces for the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit. This was for a friend's kids; the armies were handed over at the weekend, and the inaugural battle was fought - largely according to the book, although Beorn was a notable casualty and Thorin survived. In the end, it was the stout Lake Men who put paid to Bolg.

Here are the HOTT elements involved:

Beorn:

Dain and his dwarves:

Thorin Oakenshield and his companions:

Gandalf, Bilbo, the Elf-king and the elves:

The Lake Men:

The forces of good (minus Beorn and the Eagle):

The goblin hordes:

Bolg of the North and his bodyguard:

The wargs:

Warg riders:

"They ride upon wolves, and the wargs are in their train":

The forces of evil:

The eagles:

The whole lot, more or less, including the bat clouds at the back.

An elf

This is an old Grenadier elf by Mark Copplestone. I wanted to try out the simplified painting method I've been using on my Nick Lund orcs on a different designer's miniature. The method involves just base colour and a single highlight for most areas, with a third highlight on the flesh. I cheated here and added another highlight on the leather, though it was the same colour I was using to highlight the trews. 

I'm reasonably pleased with how the elf turned out. Oddly, the two-tone approach seems to work OK on both the 'messy' Lund miniatures and the very 'clean' Copplestone ones. I suspect it might work less well on things that fall in the middle.