LotR Easterling/Harad Army

Lord of the Rings Easterling/Harad Army (Prepped and/or Undercoated)

I managed to get a lot of this work done yesterday alongside the Isengard stuff, so an early post today.

I have decided to combine these two factions into one post as I think they ally very well. I will be painting them so that they can be used either separately as Haradrim and Easterlings, or together as some kind of combined force that is tied together with the paint scheme.

These two factions combined make for a great themed army, with the Eeasterlings offering up the heavy infantry and heavy cavalry, whilst the Haradrim offer lightly armed and armoured skirmishers and mounted raiders, as well as some interesting one-offs in the form of half-trolls and hasharin.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of the two factions pre-prep...

I did include some EBob Mongols and a couple of other Citadel miniatures I thought might fit in, but have decded now to do away with those in order to streamline the army to just GW LotR products...

This force is made up of the following miniatures...

Plastic:
6 Easterling kataphrakts
42 Easterling warriors
6 Haradrim raiders
36 Haradrim warriors

Metal:
2 Khamul the Ringwraith
12 Easterling kataphracts
8 Easterling heroes (capatins, banners, war priest etc.)
15 Easterling warriors
5 Haradrim heroes
3 Haradrim raiders
2 Half trolls

This gives a total of 137 evil mannish troops, consisting of 85 Easterlings and 52 Haradrim.

I have a short list of figures I would like to add to these factions just to round out a couple of units, but I am also wondering whether it would be possible to add some kind of artillery to the Easterling forces and perhaps scratch build some oliphaunts with riders?

I envisage the Easterlings as being quite advanced in field warfare, so I think artillery wouldn't look out of place - some kind of large siege/warbows, chariots of some kind (I am not keen on using the GW Khandish, but may appropriate the chariots for an Easterling crew) etc.

With regards the oliphaunts in the movies and what GW subsequently produced I am not able to get around their exaggerated size. Not sure if I am misremembering the first time Sam saw oliphaunts in the books, but I recall it as saying that the elephants were actually of a normal size, but due to Sam being practically half the size of a normal man they would appear twice as big. I will stick with my possibly misremembered theory and try to use some toy elephants that scale in and try to scratch build a howdah of some kind on them.