An Update on my Lord of the Rings hobby

This post is as a thank you to Springinsfeld for spurring me on with his suggestion to try to get in half an hour a day of gaming related work, even if it is just planning.

On Monday this week I pulled out all of the boxes, cartons, blisters and bags that contained my Lord of the Rings miniatures and began to put them into army themed piles. I then put them back into those self-same boxes, cartons, blisters and bags again. However, this time they were collected by army (rather than by type of packaging) and this gave me a much better insight into what needed to be done with the miniatures I have in my collection.

Before I went on my gaming hiatus, I had high-faluting' plans for each army that would have involved me paying out many hundreds of pounds to complete them to my requirements. When I looked at them again with my long term unemployed person's eyes I saw them differently. Yes, there are a few gaps I would like to fill, but for now I have many hundreds of miniatures to keep me busy; prepping, gluing, undercoating, painting, basing and finally playing with. I can always add to the armies as I paint them on an ongoing basis as and when I get a few quid spare (or for birthday/Christmas presents). What with Games Workshop's renewed interest and support of the game, most of the minis should still be available in a few years' time.

The pile of boxes has stood in front of my main book shelf in the lounge right in the way of everything. I did this on purpose to spur me into action. I will only put them back whence they came when the miniatures have been taken out of their packaging, cut off their sprues etc., cleaned up and put into proper figure storage boxes (luckilly I have several of these available that I have collected over the years).

This un-boxing and re-boxing took me the best part of three or four hours. It seems like a long time but there was a lot of sorting to do and every time I saw something that made me go "Ooh, I forgot I had them" the procrastinator in me kicked in as I imagined how to build the force further around those particular troops. I had to kick those thoughts into touch and just get on with the job.

Tuesday saw me looking at the miniatures in a different way. I was to look at each army, see what I had and work out some quick wins to get them prepped. So, I sorted out three or four of them that will get my attention first. These were the smaller forces I have been collecting, so will be quicker to prep and then subsequently paint and get onto the gaming table.

The armies I will be looking at first, in no particular order, will be the Haradrim, Dwarfs, Dunlendings, Isengard Uruk Hai and some eBob Mongols I will use as Easterling mercenaries. The Mongols were easy as I only have 10 footmen and 6 cavalry for my force. These have already been glued up, undercoated and painting is underway (although I will change their colour scheme when I get round to painting them proper). I decided to build an army a day, so these will be the subjects of my next few posts.

Unfortunately, the way real life goes I only got a little bit of time on Friday (couldn't do anything on Wednesday and Thursday) to start on the task ahead, but I used it wisely. I managed to get the Haradrim prepped for proper storage. This will be the subject of my next post.

So, in total I worked on my hobby for about 6 hours this week before I actually got down to doing any actual work on the miniatures. I also spent a good three hours on the Haradrim stuff, so 9 hours in total over the week is pretty good - more than I have done in almost two years! The writing of these blog posts also take a little time, but I won't include these details in my calculations.