Shhhhhh

Shhhhh, don't let the Shaman hear you!
Nasty pieces of work those Shamans.


Anyway, done a fairly simple paint job on him, I don't really like using magic in LotR, but I guess it has a place if used very sparingly. 


My end goal is to have one shaman for my goblin army and Druzhag (the beast shaman) for my critter/monster army. Hopefully I'll get some more wargs soon and get that army rolling along!


For now, here's some extreme close-up of Shar'lok the Shaman. Hmm. Didn't realise I'd done that Sh word for the Shaman until just now! As always, the camera has done some extreme lighting increases, so picture it a little darker than this. Also you'll never see it this close up, so most of the colour transitions are far smoother when you look at it at a normal distance.

I noticed in the rules that the staff a shaman carries counts as a spear. So that gave me the idea that some shamans start off as regular goblins that only realise they have some supernatural power in the course of some battle or other event. Shar'lok here was a normal goblin warrior until he found himself beset upon in the course of an argument by an Uruk! With the pressure on and in the midst of being throttled, he narrowed his beady little eyes and uttered a guttural phrase. The Uruk was transfixed and, shortly thereafter, gutted. Shar'lok "appropriated" the pike and his fellow goblins were awed.

Since then, Shar'lok has maintained most of his original armour and can still win a fight if he has to. He has also become somewhat of a rat-kin, and you can almost always find one of the verminous horde nearby. Some say that he can communicate with them and uses them to find secrets. Others say that he just eats the best ones for himself without sharing.

His mangy brown cloak isn't even long enough to completely cover his body, but he keeps it cowled over his head and covering his old shield arm. Nobody knows why. Some say it's deliberate to show that he is still wearing his warrior armour. Others say that his magic has shrivelled his arm to a husk of bone and tissue. Perhaps it's just to deliberately cause mystery? Or maybe he doesn't want to share the rat-drumstick that he's got there.

I may do some more little touches, like the rat teeth for example, or some runes or something. But I may not =)

In any case, now I don't have to proxy Druzhag as my goblin shaman, so that's all good.

I'm relatively happy with the way he turned out, though my greenstuff skills are pretty lame. I'd have liked the cloak to be thinner, I think, particularly the hood. More practice necessary!

EDIT:

Did a little shading around the face, added some teeth to 3-D it up a little more: