BRINGING THE LEGEND TO LIFE

The Making of the Argonath – page five

©  Lotrscenerybuilder 2008

A penny’s worth of MDF, cardboard and filler… on eBay, these statues do $25 a piece. But it takes hours of drawing, sawing, sanding and coffeeing, it does. We’re probably like everybody else in this community, with little time to waste on social talk and birthday-parties, and certainly no medals on the wall for being the local hoover-champion.

We like to work fast. We simply haven’t the patience for spending weeks or even months on a single project; that span of eleven weeks on behave of the Tower of Cirith Ungol was an exception to the rule (however, considering this Tower to be an amalgam of four different buildings, a bridge and a mountain-range it wasn’t exactly a dragging affair). In consequence we do not fuss too much over details. We’re quite happy if some piece of wood has the appearance of, let’s say, a foot or a waterwheel. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a foot or waterwheel. So that’s how we approach things: as soon as a fabricated component looks convincing enough we move on to the next. Light and shadow will do the rest.

We use texture paint to give the bricks & rock the appearance of natural stone. If it’s man-made walls, we sand the paint slightly as to imitate an even surface. We’ve shown you already how we ‘age’ MDF-walls by breaking them down into pieces and glue them back slightly askew. Just remember that the most important factor that brings your model to life is the effect of light: any object without nice shadows is likely to become as dead as mutton. We think it therefore of no use to paint whatever detail onto a model: if a button isn’t 3D it simply isn’t there…

With the statue finished, the work was far from being done. Of course, the quarry had to be part of our scenery. In order to keep things at a comfortable scale we slightly altered the position of the mining terraces…

… hoping to fool the audience …

Polyurethane foam was added to create the cliffs of the Anduin.

Length: 9.5inches / 24cm
Width: 10inches / 25cm
Height: 15.5inches / 40cm

As for painting our models, no Skull White, Rotting Flesh or Snot Green for us. You might have wondered about the exquisite blaze of colours of our scenery. Our secret is our choice of paint: we use ColorWorks spray cans made by Motip Dupli. B.V. For a basecoat we use their “Anthracite High Temp Barbeque and Stovespray”, which goes as far as 650 degrees celsius – climate change-proof therefore. Subtle accents are applied with small spurts from our black, red, green and white cans. Every layer of paint is believed to dry up within an hour, but we have found out that a minute or two suffices… Thus, painting a finished model usually takes about fifteen minutes. Max.

Texture paint combined with stovespray on the helmet of Isildur…
(In this style 10/6).

It took us a little over two weeks to complete Isildur’s statue, and another week and a half to build Elendil’s. But of course we didn’t create these fantastic statues, we only copied them. If we are correct it was John Howe and Mary MacLachlan of P.J.’s LOTR Art Department Three Foot Six who designed and built this wonder of ancient Middle-earth. We’re indebted to them!

“I love the Argonath. How they [the Númenórians] did it, I don’t know. There would have been some fantastic scaffolding and there would’ve been a great footage to do a rig for a model, to show the construction of the Argonath. Because I think it eclipses the pyramids frankly… But anyway, we had to think it’s true and make it look like that’s what they did…”
(Mary MacLachlan’s commentary on the Argonath, in: “The Appendices”, part two)

Im Morloth hain echant