Category: 40k

Here’s a blast from the past! For this round of the challenge we went back to troops, and I had the perfect unit lined up for the occasion: 20 gretchin from the second edition of Warhammer 40,000. These have been lying around boxes of ork bits as bare plastic for a very long time indeed!

Painting 20 of the exact same model is a bit mind numbing but I do find it easier than painting 20 models that are all similar but not quite the same. At least in the same model case you can just get in a rhythm and you’ll find the same bits in the same place each time. Pick a colour and get through it!

These are really characterful models and were also fun to paint because of that. I tried to simplify the paintjob on some of the areas of the model to speed up the process, but I found I was having enough fun that I did quite a few stages on some areas. The skin is the same four green stages I do on the orks, only lacking the red wash I give the orks on their lips and around the eyes. For some reason these models felt they should stay all green!

From the back you can see the one real shortcut I took: their tunics. These were done with a single coat of GW’s Snakebite Leather over the Vallejo Dunkelgelb undercoat. I think that worked out ok. Juxtaposed with the more worked-on areas it looks less lazy than it might otherwise.

Overall a very fun round of the challenge, and I still have just under a week till the next round to fill with some other project. I have some more Riders of Rohan on the go, so they might get finished in that time, we’ll see!

For this round of the challenge, we went back to elites and I chose to get started on the rather large pile of Meganobz in my possession. I had hoped to get more than this done, but sometimes life gets busy and painting time cut short! Still I got three done, enough to qualify as a legal unit!

These were interesting to paint, I wasn’t sure whether to undercoat them the ochre-yellow I’ve used for the rest of the army, or got to sliver to help with the amount of metal on the models. I settled on silver with the idea that painting in the metal plates yellow would be less work than picking out metal details in silver later. I think that decision worked out, so the next batch will also start from silver, and any vehicles I do for the army will follow the same method.

The large amount of metal aside, these were painted much like the rest of the army to keep things consistent. I like to keep my ork models looking different to each other to communicate the ramshackle nature of their engineering, so I tried to vary the colours of details as much as possible across these, especially when those details are from the same parts of the kit (for example the gun arm on the leftmost and center ork are the same piece)

Overall I’m happy with these and now I have a set method for approaching them I hope to get more done next time we pick elites!

For this round of the challenge we chose the HQ slot, which I immediately knew I wanted to paint up this warboss for. I’ve had this model (like most of my Orks!) for many years, and been looking forward to painting it for a long time. I got him in the Stormclaw box (Orks vs. Space Wolves), but I’m pretty sure you can get him in another set these days. One of my first ever models was the old metal warboss with an attack squig on his arm, so I think one of the reasons I like this model so much is nostalgia!

I painted this model much like the rest of the army so far. I don’t generally like to actively paint my characters to a higher standard, they just tend to get more details due to the fact I’m painting them alone rather than as part of a batch.

The first squig in the army was blue (on the Runtherd from last round), and I decided to make this one blue as well. Hadn’t quite decided if I was going to keep all of the army’s squigs blue, but it’s looking more likely now!

The rockets on the gun were an interesting challenge, I wanted them to stand out from each other, but not look too toylike even though I was going to paint them mostly straight primary colours. I think it worked out ok.

I really enjoyed painting those gun holsters, leather is one of those materials I find quite interesting to paint, you can add a lot of hard surface techniques like texture and scratches to this organic material. I usually paint leather from a dark warm brown all the way up to a bone colour for those extreme highlights. Here I tried something a bit different, by starting with my midtone (Vallejo Game Color Beasty Brown), and washing in the shadows with Agrax Earthshade. Then proceeded through with my usual steps up to bone. That felt like it lacked that richness I get from my usual process, so I glazed some Vallejo Game Ink Flesh Wash over the end result, which added that warmth back in. I think this ended up being a bit faster than layering all the way up from dark brown, so this may end up being my standard army painting method for brown leather.

The power klaw was a good testbed for a unit I’ll have to paint at some stage: Mega-nobz! I painted this exactly like the rest of the yellow in the army, and to me that’s ended up with a nice level of separation between the plates, so I think it’ll work well for models that will end up being 90% armour plates!

For round two of our army painting challenge, we picked elites as the unit type. I decided to paint up a collection of single character models Orks can take as elites choices: a nob with Waaagh! banner, a painboy, and a runtherd.

The nob with Waaagh! banner is a small conversion of one of the old metal nobs set. I just extended the banner pole and added the large moon symbol which I made out of plasticard.

The painboy and its grot orderly is the older metal version. Very fun model, love the idea of an ork wearing a surgical mask. I had a bit of fun painting the syringe to look like it’s filled with a red liquid, hopefully that comes across well.

The runtherd is simply the model from the grot kit, with a headswap from the old fantasy orc range. I like the idea of him having this yellow moon shaped bonnet to tie him in with the rest of the models.

As always with orks, these models are fun and characterful which makes them very enjoyable to paint!

Just over a week ago I was asked to join into a tale of four warlords type challenge where every two weeks all the participants need to add and paint a unit to a Warhammer 40,000 army. I decided to use this as an excuse to get my first ever 40k army painted up: Orks!

This time around we had to paint a troops unit, which is a good place to start when testing out a colour scheme. I don’t know what the next unit type will be just yet, but I’m keen to find out and get cracking as these were very enjoyable to paint.

I’ve been collecting Orks on and off for a very long time (probably not far off 20 years!) so I have quite few models in my collection, and I’ve never really made a serious attempt to get an army painted, so most of them are bare plastic. These particular models weren’t even built! For a lot of others I’ll have to cut off the 25mm bases and replace them with 32mm bases as is standard for Orks these days, a task I’m not looking forward to, but want to do as the 32mm bases look much better on these rather big models.

I’ve always loved the look of Orks on desert bases, so that was an easy decision. I’ve been experimenting with using dry pigments for basing for a while now, and I pretty much replicated the scheme off of the bases I made for my Rosa’s Ravagers.

I spent a bit of time on the areas I think are most important to the models: the skin and the yellow armour that marks them out as Bad Moons. I’ve documented the steps for those in the image above.

Overall very happy with the scheme and keen to keep this challenge going!