warhammer 40000 – Lair of the Lagomorph

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.

I’ve been busy trying to get through the remaining miniatures needed for the 100 target I have in the 1 Million Miniatures challenge. I left the last post at 36, and with just over a month left I needed a bit of a speed boost. Luckily for me I found 29 of the most speed paintable miniatures: Ghouls!

So why are they so speed paintable? Well they’re mostly organic materials, which lend themselves really well to airbrushing and washing, which are two elements that help you get far fast. On top of that, they’re mostly one organic material: skin!

To get these done fast, I leveraged my airbrush to get a terracotta colour base coat, followed by a dead flesh zenithal (from above) spray. I then picked out bones, fur, leather, stone, using contrast paints, and painted over the metal areas.

I then airbrushed some acrylic floor polish all over them (an old military modelling trick – basically a cheap way to get gloss varnish). Once that was dry (helped along with a hair dryer), I did an all over oil wash with a mix of terracotta, magenta, brown, and a blueish grey to get a brownish purple with some red accents. Again I helped it along with a hair dryer before wiping the oil off the raised areas with some makeup sponges. I then applied some texture paste and grass clumps to the bases and left everything to dry/cure overnight.

The next morning I did a brown acrylic wash over the bases, painted the base rims, airbrushed on some matt varnish and painted on some blood effects on their mouths and hands. Overall painting time was approximately 4h split over the two sessions ~2.5 hours before the overnight drying session, and an hour or so for the final touches. So nice and quick for 29 models!

I quite like this kind of painting, it’s quite cathartic to just glob oil paint all over your models knowing you can clean them up after. There’s not too many models you can do this to however. I did do something similar in the past with acrylic washes for the Goblin Town models, but I think I like the oil route better, it’s more controllable and the extended drying time is actually really helpful when doing so many models.

I also tried out my new Dark Eldar scheme on some Wyches:

They’re probably a little rough for my liking, so I might take my time a bit more on the next batch, but they still look nice at table level.

Anyway that adds a nice 34 extra miniatures to my tally, taking me up to 70 total which is a much more comfortable place to be with little over a month to go in the challenge. Let’s see what catches my fancy next!