Orks – Lair of the Lagomorph

Ork Meganobz

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!