Simarils Rampant - Tolkien's Silmarillion 1st Age Noldor Elf Conversion

I recently joined a new group on Facebook called 'Wargaming In Middle Earth.' It's a group dedicated to all aspects of Middle Earth gaming with all sorts of figure scales and rules. What drew me to it is the excellent conversion work of Graham Green, who converts historical Dark Age figures into Tolkien-esque Elves to try to create Elves that actually look like what Tolkien himself would have envisaged, rather than the Peter Jackson or Warhammer things out there that everyone seems to do. Anyway, this really floated my boat as I've always had my own vision of Tolkien's Elves, based on Victor Ambrus' brilliant illustrations in the old Tolkien Bestiary by David Day. Here's an example of one of them. I love this picture!

So I decided to have a go! Thus, after a couple of weeks of chopping, glueing, greenstuffing, agonising over colour scheme and panicking over what on earth I was going to do with the shield, here is my first ever Dark Age historical to 1st Age Tolkien Elf conversion! 

The base figure is a Gripping Beast Arthurian Pict Noble, with a GB sword. The shield is also GB, from the Normans range but it has had the boss filed away. The head comes from a GW LOTR Guard of the Galadhrim Court. The cloak is my very first attempt at large scale sculpting of flat cloth and I'm dead chuffed with it, although it took a bloody age to do! The cloak clasp is also greenstuff and turned out well despite being a rather happy accident after some experimenting with different ways to make said clasp!! He is painted in my usual style. The shield design is based on one I saw on a LBM shield transfer set for Mantic Miniatures Elves. It was hell's own nightmare to paint, to be honest! But I like it now it's done.  

I don't have any particular Elven kingdom in mind for this fella, although the blue colour scheme suggests Fingolfin or Fingon's houses. Apparently the star suggests a link to Feanor. I'll just leave it pretty open. He's gonna be joined by a  war band of similar conversions. I have a bunch of West Wind Arthurian awaiting some conversion work and I have ordered a box of the new and rather lovely Oathmark plastic Elves, so expect more 1st Age Elf goodness over the next few weeks. I'm also painting the evil army, completing several WIP Orc units that I started ages ago and a large wingless fire-drake (Glaurung). Expect pics of these bad guys shortly. These will be used in games of Silmarillion-based Dragon Rampant (I'm calling it 'Simarils Rampant') so that gives you an idea of the force sizes to be expecting.

Anyway, here's that Elf. Hope you like him!