Cavalier, I have read both the Silmarillion and all the appendices many times over, so I'm no stranger to those
if anyone's interested in further further reading (because Silmarillion *can* be a bit too much for many people), I recommend checking out Jane Chance's and Tom Shippey's books and compendiums (compendiae?) of Tolkien-related articles, like "Tolkien the Medievalist" and "The Road to Middle-Earth"
So I've had both successes and failures as far as my greenstuffing went; the success is that it's generally done and it looks decently well from some distance, the failure that it's not quite what I hoped for, when one inspects it more closely. Generally speaking the anchors were difficult to pull off in most part, as I suspect, since I didn't really wait for my greenstuff to harden a bit before attempting to do them; afterwards when reading about cape-modelling I've come across several opinions that you have to let it harden when working on smaller details... oh well, lesson for the future.
Also, I've left the Knights' helmets alone for the moment - I've tried sculpting those wings for them, but at first couldn't achieve anything that wouldn't look like a much uglier and bulkier version of all those fancy lines that they already have on their helmets. However I did have some moderate success when scuplting helmet wings for my converted prince Erchirion - I've changed the method for doing them, but it takes absolutely forever now, so I'm wary of doing the same for all six Knights. Might reconsider over the weekend, but not sure yet.
Also one last thing - since the Foot Knights of Dol Amroth have been unavailable from GW's website for quite some time now and I'm not about to pay 30 pounds for 3 of them on Ebay just because they're OOP, I've come up with an alternative plan: use my Numenorean Warriors (of which I have 12 at the moment, about right for a single squad), convert 3 of them to form a command group and give all of them Ebob's swan heads (
http://www.ebobminiatures.com/products/head2.jpg) -> that way they'll have a distinct appearance and I won't have to buy a plethora of new models. (It is a bit of a shame though, since I really liked the GW's models...)
Onwards to pictures: first up, how the shields with anchor sigil turned out (as you'll notice, they are very crude in general, but trust me, it doesn't look THAT bad from some distance
)
The lances: in this case the results are a bit better and a bit worse - a bit better since they are less visible, a bit worse since it was much harder to make those anchors that small and personally I think they turned out even worse than the shield ones:
And finally, the start of my converted Prince Erchirion - I still need to get the rulebook to work out what weapon options he might have (probably sword and lance, but better safe than sorry) and also to file off his White Tree. He is also going to have a cape at some point. (pictures are a bit out of focus, but that's because my camera is sucky).
Also I'm wondering about the foor model for Prince Erchirion - my original plan was to simply hack off Prince Imrahil's head and replace it with armoured Faramir's head with some scuplted wings, like above. But then an idea came to me to simply utilise the armoured Faramir on foot, sculpt him some wings and a cape - the pros of that are that both models will resemble each other better, especially since I have to scratchbuild mounted Erchirion's shield, so there's a change it will not be as nice as Imrahil's. The obvious downside is that the foot model won't be half as nice - after all, Imrahil is designed specifically to look like a man of Dol Amroth and it's visible in almost every inch of the miniature... well, I'll probably sleep on that problem and come to some conclusion later on.
Next up: spraying horses and either (1) assembling and spraying Knights to get them ready for painting or (2) first sculpting some helmet wings for them.