Tag: Orks

Steel Legion Guardsmen

40k, AoS, Blood Bowl, Warhammer: The Old World

As you know I’ve been painting away to meet the 1 Million Miniatures challenge, where I pledged to paint 100 miniatures at my local GW store. Last post saw me get to 91 miniatures, and with a little over a week left I decided to paint up this squad of Steel Legion Imperial Guard troops, which would take me up to 101 miniatures.

I only have 10 of these old metal models, but I decided to paint them as if I was painting an army of them, which suited the speed painting I needed to do for the challenge anyway. With the new Armageddon Warhammer 40,000 set coming out, one has to hope they’re re-releasing Steel Legion miniatures one day, which means I might be able to add to these!

Painting-wise, these were extremely simple and quick. To get a head start on the trench coats, I undercoated the models with Vallejo German Dark Yellow/Dunkelgelb airbrush primer. I then picked out what is visible of their skin in Pro Acryl Shadow Flesh, followed by covering all the leather areas (Masks, straps, books, ammo pouches… there’s a lot of leather on these models) in Wildwood contrast paint. The bedrolls are Vallejo German Fieldgrey WWII, the helmets Vallejo German Camo Dark Green. The gun casings in Vallejo German Grey, and finally the metal areas in Scale75 Black Metal.

I then went for my usual all over wash, but instead of my go to Agrax Earthshade I decided to try something a little bit lighter as Earthshade can be a little dark over colours like the trench coats. Instead I decided to experiment and went for Army Painter Soft Tone. It worked really nicely, giving a nice gradient over a lot of the models. It led me to think that I might get away with minimal highlights on the models – great for army painting. For highlights I simply picked out the raised areas of the helmets, trenchcoats, and metallic areas in their respective basecoat paints (upside of using airbrush primer, you can paint it on when you need to), did a few line highlights on the guns with the German grey mixed with some AK Ivoryand that was it. The final touch was painting the glass on the goggles in Citadel Contrast Blood Angels Red – couldn’t help going for that Fallout New Vegas NCR Ranger look, too iconic!

The basing was simple as well, a thorough covering of AK Sandy Desert texture paint, followed by some MIG Brick Dust pigments. The base rim is Two Thin Coats Druid Flesh.

So with these done, this takes my tally to 101 models, completing the challenge! So what do these 101 models look together you ask? Well I couldn’t resist finding out so I laid them out for a family portrait.

The answer is… eclectic! That’s quite a few model ranges represented there, but I’m proud to say only the Amazons were purchased during this challenge, all the other models I already had and were sitting unpainted in boxes, some for many many years. This then was a great excuse to get some paint on these older models and put a dent in the backlog!

Having the challenge finished is a bit of a weight of my shoulders, I enjoyed painting all these models, but the focus on speed definitely influenced the models I picked to paint, and I look forward to being able to pick and choose what I paint more freely!

Ork Meganobz

40k

Continuing on the 100 miniature target for the 1 Million Miniatures challenge, here’s the next set of miniatures into the speed painting grinder: 9 Ork Meganobz!

I’ve already painted three of these quite a while ago, although in the bright yellows of the Bad Moon clan. This time I went for Goff colours, as I’ve been wanting to paint other clans for my orks.

The paint scheme is relatively simple for these, starting with a silver undercoat, followed by randomly picking out panels in Vallejo Heavy Red, black (Vallejo Model Black), light grey (Vallejo Heavy Bluegrey), and bronze tones (Scale75 Necro Gold and Vallejo Tinny Tin). For a few areas I also added markings like the checkered patterns so characteristics to Orks, as well as other simple shapes.

This accounts for most of the models, but they also have a few more organic areas, such as the flesh and clothes. The flesh was base coated in dark green (Vallejo Heavy Blackgreen) and the pants in brown (Vallejo Chocolate Brown). I then picked out all the wiring in a variety of colours, and did an all over wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade.

For highlights, started by picking out raised areas on all metal panels (painted or not) with a bright silver (Citadel Runefang Steel). I then went over the red panels with some patchy Vallejo Heavy Red, and picked out the checkers and other white areas with a mix of the base coat (Vallejo Heavy Bluegrey) and an off-white (AK Ivory). I then liberally applied thinned down rusty brown (Vallejo Parasite Brown) all over the non-bronze metallic areas, and a copper oxide colour (Citadel Nihilakh Oxide) over all the bronze panels. For the skin highlights I did two highlights over the base coat, by first doing a 50/50 mix of the base colour (Vallejo Heavy Blackgreen) and Vallejo Goblin Green, then a final highlight of the pure Goblin Green.

Overall I’m happy with the outcome, and thoroughly enjoyed the process. Painting rusty models is always a lot of fun and lends itself well to faster painting as the whole process can be pretty loose. These models take my tally up to 79, so getting pretty close to the 100 mark which is good with a bit under a month left for the challenge.

Weirdboy

40k

For this round of the challenge we picked HQ choices, and I decided to paint a model that I’ve had and loved for a long time, but never go around to: an Orc shaman from the old Warhammer Fantasy Battles game, to use as a weirdboy for the orks (with a k!).

Boyz look on in awe as the weirdboy summons the power of Gork (or Mork!)

I wanted to keep the model as is even though I was planning on using him as a 40k ork, so to make sure he fit in with the rest of my force, I used the base to cement him in the universe. This also had the added benefit of making the model taller, which is appropriate since this model is tiny compared to the current Weirdboy model.

The paintjob followed the rest of the army, the main departure being the glowing green eyes of the staff, which were added after I’d painted the rest of the model by first picking out the eyes in white, then airbrushing Vallejo Model Air Escorpena Green where I wanted the glow. This was followed by picking out the eyes again using a mix of Vallejo Game Livery Green and Kimera White.

A quick one for this round, which was very practical as I’ve ended up needing to paint quite a few models this week!

Beast Snagga Boyz

40k

Back with more orks, this time with a distinct lack of yellow! Indeed these are not Bad Moons, but Goffs, the meanest and most serious of all Orks. I do enjoy that the 40k game system lets you include detachments from varying clans, this lets you mash together different parts of ork society into a single army. In the background ork clans often join up when there’s a big enough fight to get them all interested (presumably that’s a really easy condition to satisfy!).

The best snagga boyz are big brutes that love getting stuck in to the enemy at close range and for that reason they make a lot of sense as Goffs to me. These are brand new models to the range, and they’re quite a bit more detailed than the old plastics as tends to be the case. This has a double edged effect: on the one hand there are a lot of fun details to paint, on the other they took a bit longer than regular boyz to paint which is somewhat a negative when trying to get an army done!

I painted these much like the rest of the army, the exception being that there are no yellow metal plates, instead goffs adorn themselves with black painted armour, with patterns painted in white (checkered for the most part) and red.

The checkers were a little bit tedious to get clean, but a couple of passes seemed to do the trick. The other feature these models have that regular boyz do not is the animal pelts that cover their backs. I kept to the goff palette here and painted them red for the most part, with a reddish brown instead for the furs (I decided I didn’t want red fur).

Overall very fun to paint, it’s been nice to branch out into painting other clans!