Painting 28mm Gimli Miniature from Heroes of Helms Deep Boxed set

Colours used: Vallejo Medium Green, Offwhite, Leather Brown, Khaki, White Gold, Flat Black. Citadel Bestial Brown, Dark Flesh, Yellow Sand, Shining Gold and Mitril Silver.

This article is a complement to the article about painting 28mm Aragorn miniature from The Heroes of Helms Deep boxed set by Games Workshop. Based on the story, Aragorn and Gimli fought together side by side to buy time for the warriors of Rohan to repair the damage gate of Helm’s Deep.

So this painting article completes the scene where the duo fought heroicly together.

The goal of this project was to achieve a colouring which is more closer to the movie and so the colourts that I chose were not as vivid as the ones generally
used by Games Workshop.

The white metal figure miniatures from The Two Towers boxed set are well sculpted and easy to clean if you ever compared it to a plastic figure. All I needed was a needle file and wire cutter. The most important step before painting a miniature figure is to decide on what scene or location the character is supposed to be in.

Since it was Helm’s Deep, the most obvious and most commonly used scene is a rocky base. For that part , I combined some fine and coarse sand and stuck them onto the base using PVA glue diluted with water. I would let that dry a while before the priming of the miniature figure.

As I have explained previously, I used a Tamiya Fine Surface Primer to prime most of my figures to ‘lock down’ the layers of paint that I would apply later.

Without a primer, the paint would easily chip off if I accidently rub my fingers onto the painted miniature figure. Therefore it is a good idea and practice to prime your figures with a primer first.

After priming the figure, give it 2-3 Light coats of Matt Black (airbrushed or from a spray can). The whole miniature figure was drybrushed(Photo A) with white to enhance the prominent areas to make it easier to see and work on the details.


Painting Gimli’s Face

The technique I used for painting this 28mm miniature figure is very much the same as the Aragorn figure. Only this time I used Games Workshop Dark Flesh mixed with a small amount of white as the basecolour. I thinned down the paint about 1: 4 and applied very small amount of paint to the miniature figure at a time.

For blending the skin tone from the basecolour to the highlight, I just add a slightly more white to the mix. The method of adding the white by 25% increments each time is an excellent way to achieve a smooth transition.

For the shade areas around the eyes, I just used thinned down Dark Flesh at 1: 4 as the shade. (Photo B)

The eyes were simply two black dots to represent the pupils. I used matt black and painted them in via a toothpick. It is possible if you are bold and steady enough to paint more details in the eyes., however it might be tricky and time consuming because if you make a mistake, you have to rework the areas around the eyes again.

Personally for me, the cons outweigh the pros and so I keep this eye section very simple.

For Gimli’s beard, I thinned down Citadel’s Bestial Brown to 1: 5 and gave it a few coats.

I then gave a black wash into the recesses to make the outlines stand out before adding white to the Bestial Brown for the highlights. (Photo C)

Helmet

Gimli’s helmet was a coated of Vallejo’s White Gold initially. I discovered that the paint did not reach the deeper recesses of the helmet because of its flakiness and so used watered down Citadel Shining Gold and repainted the gold parts to correct that. The top leather part of the helmet was painted in Leather Brown.

More watered down Matt Black about 1:2 ratio was used to outline the edges of the helmet. The outer edges of the gold parts were finally painted with Citadel ‘s Mithril Silver. See Photo D.

Tunic

Gimli’s tunic was painted in Leather Brown in 1:4 ratio and I added white to the colour as the highlights. A black wash was later used to darken the recesses of the tunic. Refer to Photo E. Yellow Sand was used to line the pattern at the base of the tunic.

Chainmail

The chainmail parts were drybrushed lightly with Mithril Silver just to give it a metallic feel.

Boots

The boots were painted using Vallejo Khaki and similarly highlighted by adding white to the khaki base. After that black was added to the base colour to act as the shade for the boots.

Cloak

For miniature Gimli’s cloak, Vallejo’s Medium Green was used as the base colour. What I did was to drybrush the high points of the cloak using Vallejo’s Lime Green. Next I diluted the Medium Green with water and applied a filter over the drybrushed areas to tone down the Lime Green and blend the cloak.