Middle Earth Gaming - Part 1 - Gondor

Well my trip to the coast and the compulsory visit to the local gaming shop has started an entirely new project, mainly due to my sons enthusiasm, and I'm guessing that from the the title of this post you know where this is going!

This isn't my first dabble at wargaming in Middle Earth, having picked up most of GW's original 1986 range back in the day, and more recently (well in the last 10 years or so at least) I picked up some of the Middle Earth magazines that came with various miniatures(and promptly sold them). 

Middle Earth is something I've always had an interest in having cut my gaming teeth on ICE's MERP,  and Tolkien being my introduction to fantasy but my hatred of painting 28mm stuff has always held me back.

Despite that I convinced myself that both the Minas Tirith troops and the Orcs should be easy enough to paint being basically armour and drab colours respectively, and that; with a few characters and monsters would be enough for me and my son to have a casual game.

Six weeks later and I have just finished gluing, undercoating, painting, basing 130 minis, and I still have 40-50 to do!!! My mate then offered me his nicely painted Isengard army plus a bunch of other minis for a great price, so I've gone from owning 3 Middle Earth minis(the last of my 1986 range) to about 250 in just a few weeks! Anyway enough of my rambles besides I'm only trying to justify the expenditure, on to the first batch of minis that I've taken pics of:

The rank & file:

Some Generic Command:

And some named Heroes(the Gandalf wasn't painted by  me, being one of the minis I acquired):

And the whole "army":

That's the lot for Gondor, though I would like to add a small amount of cavalry at some point and maybe a handful of rangers of Ithilien, but it will do for now.

More Middle Earth in the next few posts as I am currently racing through these, and want to cut the unpainted pile down before it gets too much and outs me off!