I wanna start of with explaining where I am at right now in terms of the hobby and converting and painting my own models.
While I knew about the LotR SBG since about 2007 or 08 (really hard to say in retrospect) I never really got into it until earlier this year. Back then my cousins (and their friend) introduced me and my other cousins to this hobby. They owned wood elves, dwarves and Uruk-Hai plus a lot of kinda random stuff. Numenorians, Rohan and the like.
This topic wasn't really touched upon until maybe two years ago when two more joined in (I believe this partially had to do with the Hobbit movies dragging attention back to LotR and Middle-Earth again). They picked up Moria and Easterlings. I was the last one to join in partially for money reasons. The question was what to pick up and I remembered something else, I already did own 12 Minas Tirith soldiers which I got as a freebie. This fitted well into what the others already had (nothing doubled I mean) and I got 24 more on ebay to start of my army.
Since then my army has grown some more and includes something around 70 models. I actually started early to think about converting units. I needed captains and had noticed that the older captains barely looked any different than the soldiers. Also I owned a Fellowship Boromir made out of plastic and I thought about taking of his head and put it on a soldiers body to get a Boromir of the white tower. This I did not do eventually but I did and arm swap with two soldiers to make them different and they got promoted to captains.
Fast-forward until August when I made a grab on ebay. A lot of metal heroes, soldiers (mostly damaged and badly painted) and a trebuchet team but sadly still no captains. But I wanted to use the trebuchet team to make my own captains now and so I informed myself on Greenstuff and the like and so I began tinkering and converting.
I started with converting my own horn blower, sadly Boromir (a metal version) had to suffer for this.
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The other two guys from the trebuchet would go on to become captains, but needed something more than just different poses to be visible in the mass of soldiers. I oriented myself on the new Minas Tirith captain who has a cape to differentiate him further from the crowd and not only through his - admittedly quite heroic - pose (and stars on his armor but that was way too fiddly for me). I made the cape in the middle first and got lucky with it, very dynamic. Actually this came out like that because I almost dropped him... The second one had no such luck and his static pose got a static cape. I added in the bow and a quiver because I wanted to have someone lead my archers, even so I became aware that a bow does not benefit a Minas Tirith captain much, also his pose was just ideal for that.
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Here they are painted up, ofc in the same colour scheme as the rest of my army and the left captain got shield pretty much just tagged on to his arm.
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That's it for today. Next coming are my own conversions of veterans and the spectre who I'm working on right now.
P.S.: I developed the bad habit of overshading stuff, as you can see with the capes... Boromir lost his second arm because he was/is meant to be a King of Men. I also wanted to remove his shield from the back because it's too typical for Boromir but it turns out to be a pain in the butt...
