Armies on Parade isn’t just for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar – if you want to bring a Middle-earth™ army to this year’s competition, you’ll be in good company. We love The Hobbit: Motion Picture Trilogy™ themed display, and Roger’s Goblin-Town is an awesome example – it even doubles up as a gaming board!
Goblin army by Roger Yates
For his first attempt at Armies on Parade, Roger has put together this brilliant Goblin-Town board. “I’ve never attempted any kind of big scenery project before, so this was my first attempt at it,” says Roger. “I had been thinking it would be quite cool to do Armies on Parade one year but didn’t know what to do. But my six-year-old son is obsessed with The Lord of the Rings™ and The Hobbit: Motion Picture Trilogy™, so I thought it would be quite cool to build something we could both use. I knew I could do it in the time we had to work on the project, as the Goblins are fun to paint so I could get an army turned out quickly.
“I thought it be would quite a challenge as I’ve never built a board before,” says Roger. “The trick was to see if the finished board could match what was in my head – most of it came out alright! We had a fun time with it, and that’s the main thing.”
We think you’ll agree that Roger’s work is amazing – great painting and modelling, and ideal for gaming as well.
Roger made sure to add the disgusting throne of the Goblin King to the board as well.
“I took the worst looking colours I could find to make it look like the Goblin King had the worst diet in the world. I used green washes and brown washes around the bucket and around the floor.” Lovely.
The little pool with Bilbo Baggins™ and Gollum™ represents the place where the two meet for the first time. They’re also the only non-Goblin models Roger painted for his Armies on Parade board.
“I sprayed the whole board Mechanicus Standard Grey, before picking out the other base colours,” says Roger. “I then picked out the rest of the base colours, added a variety of shades to get different colours, then used drybrushing to highlight the details.” A simple method, but a strikingly effective one.
Goblins!
“I batch painted all of the Goblins during my lunch breaks,” says Roger. “I’ve little time to paint at home. I built them as one, basecoated them all in one go, washed them in one go, then drybrushed them up, before picking out the key details on each of them. I finished them off by adding a few highlights here and there.”
Rock Solid
“The rocks are tree bark backed with insulation foam,” says Roger. “I built up a lot of the rocks with foam, then used tree bark for the texture. There was a tree cut down on the way into work. There were these sheets of bark leftover, perfectly textured – so I grabbed what I could and built it up from there.” And now we know what Roger has got in his pocketses, the sneaky little Hobbit!
Days To Come
Having done its duty for Armies on Parade 2016, Roger intends to use his Goblin-Town board as a gaming board. Alongside Thorin Oakenshield’s Company, it’ll be the perfect board for playing out the events of The Hobbit Strategy Battle Game: Escape from Goblin Town™ boxed set.
Roger intends to paint up Thorin Oakenshield’s Company next, but he also wants to add even more Goblins to his collection. “You can’t have enough Goblins, can you?” says Roger. He’s not wrong!
This article was first published in the November 2016 issue of White Dwarf Magazine.
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