Since they are out of stock and are impossible to buy at a reasonable price on ebay, i decided to provide myself with 24 custom Goblin Black Shields, I will use them to boost my Misty Mountains army for War of the Ring games. I’m not the best at sculpting, but I am quite happy with the final result, I hope you too will appreciate.
I started this project buying a bunch of cheap mordor orcs (less than 1 euro per model), selecting the following poses to start converting:
Then I cut the heads and modified arms and hands. Some of the original orc arms were replaced by other spare bits I had (mostly fireforge kits). I decided to clone the helmet of a goblin by using blue stuff: I made a bunch of molds with blue stuff but instead of filling them with the standard mix of 50% green stuff 50% milliput I used the "Acrylic Resin" from Greenstuff World. This stuff is more like plaster than resin and once mixed with water it cures without melting the bluestuff. The advantage of acrylic resin is that I can pour that within the mould to catch all the small detail as with liquid resins, without melting the bluestuff mould. However Acrylic Resin has its downside: it is hard to work and clean after cured and it is less flexible compared to green stuff, it also tends to break quite easily and the process of casting I used sometimes produced annoying air bubbles. But after many attempts I managed to work this stuff and get good casts that I used for this project as you can see.
Using green stuff/milliput, I sculpted the fur around the neck and glued the heads. Since i didn’t like the cloaks of the GW originals I didn’t sculpted that part, but instead I added more fur on the back of the models. To some models I glued some fake pieces of scalemail obtained by casting greenstuff into a mould I previously made. The mould was made of bluestuff used to copy the pattern of my x-acto knife. I let the greenstuff curing into the mould more than 3 hours, waiting for the perfect consistency: it has to be hard enough to maintain the details and shape but still flexible to be bended and adjusted to fit the miniature.
Lastly I created their iconic big shields: using bluestuff moulds i have replicated 3 goblin shields with green stuff, then I cut the bigger spike (almost cut the shield in half) on each shield and glued them toghether. Then I filled the gaps using the melted milliput technique (basically watering down the milliput so it acts like liquid greenstuff). These bigger shields have been replicated with blue stuff and fit perfectly with the greater size of the orc models.
The models are not yet finished: they need to be painted and the helmets miss the horns due to air bubbles but I think I’m going to sculpt these details over the next month. I like to see how imposing they are compared with their other goblin comrades. This project has required lot of time but it was much cheaper than buying the originals from ebay or from any future GW release/recast. Leave a comment if you liked or if u have any suggestion to improve these little boys.
