First up, some early goblins as featured in the Mines of Moria boxed set. The spiky armour put me in mind of the Morannon orcs, so our large supply of goblins (a set of partially-damaged ones from eBay, and some painted examples bought from a friend) were painted-up as Mordor goblins. Incidentally, I often get asked about repainting plastics, and how to strip the paint. I use Dettol - the brownish antiseptic liquid you can buy for sterilising things. It stinks like a hospital, but it's great for safely stripping plastics.
Take your painted miniatures and cram as many as you can into a clean empty can or jar (or other similar container), then top-up the container with neat Dettol until all the models are covered. Leave for a few hours, then give them a stir. Leave for a few more hours, and stir again - by now, the paint should be lifting away. After stir two, I usually leave them overnight. Once they've had their 24 hours or so, I decant the Dettol back into the bottle via a coffee filter paper (to catch bits of paint), then fill a bowl with warm soapy water (washing up liquid or hand cleaner will do for the detergent) and dunk the miniatures in. A bit of scrubbing with an old toothbrush gets off the stubborn bits. Then rinse in clean warm water and leave to dry. Presto! Nice clean miniatures, ready to paint.
Be aware... Dettol dissolves superglue, PVA etc.. The goblins I did were scenic based, and the blobby mess was like peeling mucus away. For later batches, I just chopped the bases off (which also meant I could fit more into the can).
As for the paintjob, the skin was painted greenish-grey - slightly more green than the orcs, to make them look a little different, younger even. I pushed this idea on with the colour scheme too - using a brighter red for the 'eye' badges and some fabric areas. Metal was painted the way I usually do it - GW Boltgun metal, then inks. The home-made shields are plastic card, deliberately cut uneven and orc-sized so that they looked almost clumsy and unwieldy in the hands of the goblins. This gives them a more defensive look, to remind me not to try using them for headlong charges against ranks of armoured elves...
Then along came The Hobbit movies, and a new species of goblin. Not much use, outside of the 'Goblin Town' set they come with, and I toyed with pinching them for my Warhammer Nurgle army (a chaos god who delights in all things rotted / degenerate etc.). In the end, I painted them almost to match the movie ones. They an still be employed in Warhammer 40k games as some sort of degenerate aliens, aligned with Nurgle.
The paint scheme is absurdly simple, as there's not much on them to paint. Grey primer, then a special mix flesh tone (6 parts flesh, 2 parts grey, 1 part dark yellow, 1 part tan). Pick out the buboes in a suitable pus colour, and the eyes in off-white. The straggly hair is light grey highlighted off-white, the clothing / rags is mostly olive drab or tan, and that's about it. Metal weapons are done as for the Mordor goblins, and non-metal weapons usually mid-brown and a sort of 'bone' off white. Then the whole model gets washed in mid-to-light brown.
They came out darker than originally planned, but I was happy with the effect of 'dirt on unhealthy skin'. Some of the sculpts are truly grim - with club feet and arms, withered limbs, hunchbacks etc.. Gloriously horrible.
There's so little equipment on them that I found myself getting quite excited when I found a pouch or pack to paint.
I haven't decided what to do with the bases yet, so they're still in grey primer. I need something which suggests 'cave', but also works with my other based miniatures. Maybe sand and small rocks.
The set also came with plenty of 'Goblin Town' scenery, which I'll put in a separate post.
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