I Tried to Paint Samwise Gamgee Live for Hobbit Day With No Plan, No Glue, and No Idea What I Was Doing

For Hobbit Day I planned nothing at all. Instead of any structured project, I decided to pull out my old Samwise Gamgee miniature, build him, prime him, and paint him live with absolutely no knowledge of how to do his face, his cloak, or his hair. I called the whole exercise "painting Sam raw," and I want to be upfront that this was never going to be a tutorial.

My honesty going in was simple: "my upfront honesty with you is that I am crap at painting." I described the whole thing as "every reason why you shouldn't paint with me" and "every reason why you shouldn't put me on whilst you paint." As I put it, "I'm not whimsical. I'm not calm. I'm not collected," and I told anyone sticking around, "good luck to you."

Why This Was Going Out Completely Unedited

I decided not to edit any of this, posting it exactly as it happened aside from the stopping and starting caused by moving around a house I hadn't tidied. There was going to be no fancy extra footage and none of my usual, as I called it, "aesthetically pleasing" style this time around.

My plan for the moments when painting needed my full concentration, since my brain "can't focus on multiple things at once," was to read an excerpt from The Fellowship of the Ring focused on Sam, then lay that reading over whatever the camera had captured and hope it all came together in the edit afterward.

Hunting Down Basic Supplies Before Painting Could Even Start

Getting to the painting stage took a while. I had to go upstairs for clippers and pliers, discovered the miniatures were numbered but the bases were not, and genuinely could not work out which base Sam was supposed to go in because they were all the same size. As I admitted, "Can you tell I've never done this before? Cuz my army was fully built. I've actually never assembled one."

Along the way I knelt on a piece of Lego, got cat hair on the base, and realized I had no glue at all, so I used resin instead to fix Sam into his base and simply hoped for the best.

Digging Through a Neglected Paint Box for the Right Colors

My paint box is something I described as neglected, and finding what Sam actually needed took real effort. I pulled a silver called Runefang Steel for his hair, hunted for black, and couldn't find a brown at all, eventually settling on a paint called Bugman's Glow instead. For red I mixed what I called "a Mephiston Red and a bit of Evil Sunz Scarlet," joking that Evil Sunz Scarlet sounded like a band name.

I also found a green that had somehow turned blue in the pot, calling it "a science experiment," and discovered I had no white paint despite needing one. On top of that, my usual water pot, a protein tub I mention using in every video, had gone missing, so I ended up using a plastic camping wine glass instead.

Priming Samwise Gamgee on a Dog Chewed Bone

When it came time to prime him, I realized I had nothing proper to mount him on outside, so I used what I described as "a really old man bone that my dogs have chewed," warning any vegans watching to look away. I was convinced he was going to blow straight off it in the wind, but he stayed put long enough to get primed.

Making Up Painting Technique As I Went

I had no idea how to approach his face, his cloak, or his hair. For the blue cloak, my plan was to paint a lighter color first and then apply a darker blue wash over the top, reasoning out loud that this was probably the sensible order even though, as I said, part of why I don't enjoy painting is that I never do any research to help myself first.

The process did not go smoothly. I accidentally painted his hand blue when I hadn't meant to, and at one point I said outright, "how do people do this for fun? It is so stressful."

Reading the Fellowship of the Ring Excerpt About Frodo and Boromir

When the painting got too demanding to talk through, I read the section of The Fellowship of the Ring covering the company's choice at Amon Hen. Aragorn tells Frodo the burden of deciding the Fellowship's path falls to him, and Frodo asks for an hour alone. Boromir follows him up the hill, urges him toward Minas Tirith, and grows increasingly fixated on the Ring, eventually trying to take it from Frodo by force. Frodo escapes by putting the Ring on, climbs to the seat of Amon Hen, and sees visions of war across Middle earth before sensing the Eye of Sauron searching for him.

Frodo decides he must leave the Fellowship and go to Mordor alone, believing the Ring has already begun to corrupt the company through Boromir. Because of time, I skipped ahead to Boromir returning to the others looking shaken, and the company scattering to search for Frodo. Sam works out on his own that Frodo intends to leave without him and heads for the boats, at one point saying, "Sam Gamgee, your legs are too short, so use your head." He then jumps into the river to catch up, nearly drowns, and Frodo pulls him into the boat, finally accepting that Sam is coming with him to Mordor after all.

Where Samwise Gamgee Was Left By the End

By the time I stopped, Sam was nowhere near finished. I hadn't touched his weapons or his saucepan, the cloak had no highlighting on it yet, and his hair and head were, in my words, "nowhere remotely close to being ready." I had to stop because he needed to dry before I could keep working without everything smudging together, and I wasn't sure whether I'd get back to him later that evening.

My closing verdict was blunt: "This is all of the reasons we don't paint together. You should never paint with me ever again." I told anyone who found the process stressful to go find calmer painters online, but added that if you related to the chaos instead, "we belong together."