Legolas!

You may be forgiven, dear reader, if you think this figures comes from Games Workshop’s official Middle-Earth line of miniatures. In fact, it is an old Reaper figure sculpted by Sandra Garrity, and it almost exactly fits my mental image of Legolas.

He’s armed with bow and knife, just like in the books. He is dressed in practical, travel clothes, but still has something of the prince about him. Perhaps most tellingly, he is wearing a leaf-shaped cloak clasp.

So, with apologies to Orlando Bloom and WETA, who I really do think did a great job of bringing him to life in the films, this is going to be my go-to Legolas for wargaming.

Wanting him to fit in with my other LOTR minis presented an initial problem. The miniature comes on an integral base. In truth, this is right about the size of a GW base anyway, but not close enough for my liking. So, I started by painstakingly cutting him off his base. I managed to lose just a little bit of one of his boots doing this, but sculpted it back with green stuff. Thankfully the flocking covers this up anyway.

I based the colours of his tunic and shirt on the original Orlando Bloom outfit, though adding in the gold tunic edging to give him that princely touch. For the most part, it was an extremely fun and easy miniature to paint. I painted the cloak grey, since this is obviously the one given to him in Lothlorien. The only real challenge was the ‘Lorien Leaf’ at his throat. This is a very detailed little piece, and I wanted to see if I could match the colours used in the movie. So, I did something I rarely ever do. I put on a pair of heavy-magnification reading glasses and painted a bit of emerald between the silver outlines on the leaf, which worked out really well.

Thanks to photographing the mini for this blog, I can see just a few bits I’d like to tidy up, but overall, I’m extremely satisfied with the figure, and hope to work him into some games in the future. As you can see below, he’s a very good fit with the GW Middle-Earth Range.