Saruman had taken a drubbing in recent games, and so I felt I needed to give him the sort of numerical advantage that he sought to overthrow Rohan. To this end I rooted out all the odd spare figures I had laying around plus a few very cheap eBay lots and sent them off to get painted by Fernando Enterprises. One of the eBay lots was a sprue of 12 Dunlendings (link) as these would add another troop type.
Well, they all came back from Sri Lanka while I was tarting up the Uruk Hai reported in the last post. But I managed to quickly do the required minimal retouching and basing (texturing and painting) for them to join the Uruks from the previous post to make an imposing reinforcement for the Army of Orthanc.
Added to my existing units, they bring Saruman's forces up to:
103 Orcs (aka Goblins)
47 Uruk Hai
12 Dunlendings
8 Wargs (unridden)
7 Warg Riders
2 Trolls
The Orcs were painted by Fernando to match previous batches and required no touching up at all, except the tips of their spears were painted red so I redid these with gunmetal (but that was dead easy and very quick). The Dunlendings needed a little bit more, but nothing a quick spot of paint wouldn't fix. On the subject of fixing I had to mend two of the Dunlendings' weapons. I can't fault Fernando for this as the figures were superbly packaged, and any blame is down to Games Workshop for the incredibly spindly weapons on these figures. Anyway, I was very pleased with the Dunlendings and they deserve their own photo to show off the brushwork.
Also included in the batch of figures were five odd Riders Rohan figures I put together from spare bits and broken figures. These were painted by Fernando to match the previous batch they did for me.
These figures are a very good match to the earlier batch but did require a little bit more tidying up. I think that's because these are less detailed sculpts than the Dunlendings, and Fernando's painters do better when there's a clear feature to paint rather than one that requires a bit of interpretation. I added and hand-painted the flag myself based on a design I foud online. I'm rather pleased with it, especially the horse, which is clearly influenced by the White Horse at Uffington. Hiding in the back of the above photo is a spare horse I decided to use as a casualty marker, complete with embedded arrow (the latter also had broken off so was replaced by another provided by a friend at my local club).
These, combined with my existing figures, give me a total of 20 mounted Rohirrim, more than enough for a skirmish.
Caveat on Fernando painting: I also sent some small batches of Blue Moon Miniatures 15mm US Cavalry ...
... and Plains Indians with a view to starting a new project.
I was not pleased with the photos sent back, and in the end, Fernando said they had done all they could to fulfil my requests for changes and returned the figures at no charge. While it was very reasonable to not charge me for these figures, I was surprised that some of the changes, like painting the moccasins a brown leather colour rather than black was considered too technically challenging.
It seems that 15mm castings might not be their strength, especially fairly rough castings like Blue Moon. OTOH their handling of the Dunlendings suggest that
any modern range of 28mm plastic figures will turn out rather well.
