Space Orks in Colour (a painting blog)

I thought I'd do a bit of a log of the painting of my Waagh! both as a log and as a bit of a motivation boost.

I was pretty intimidated by the sheer scale of the horde I plan on building and as I also have a ~5000 point army of Steel Legion (that can do double-duty as ~4000 points of Kreig) with each trooper having at least 6 colours on them, I really didn't want to have 2 'horde' armies to paint like that. After much meditation on a quick and easy way to paint Orks I decided that most of the Boyz fighting as infantry would be Goffs and therefore mainly black with a bit of red here and there. I found that Ork skin could be done reasonably with a generous application of GW Biel Tan Green wash over a white spray.

First off the brush were 2 Goff Warbands. The Boyz are Defeat in Detail Skinnerz from their plastic sprues and the Grotz are Skinnerz Gobblars with some GW Grots to fill in the numbers.



Next came 8 Wagonz from the above sprues to ferry the Boyz around. My idea for their paintjob was for them to look like they could've been pulled out of a scrap heap. If I could find a good way of doing battered metal then even when I've got vehicles for all 6 Klanz of all the different colours the painting 'style' might pull them together into a roughly cohesive-looking force. I was at a loss on how to paint them until I remembered a technique I'd used on my GorkaMorka mob and thought a simplified version may suffice.

Basically I sprayed 'em black and attacked them with my 'stippling brush' (now about half an inch long and splayed to hell and back but sufficient for the task) using Ironbreaker. I aimed for an uneven silver all over followed by a wash of Agrax Earthshade to bring out the detail and give a rusty, worn colour. Then the panels were roughly painted the right colours leaving the silver showing through at the edges. A quick and easy load of Battlewagonz that appropriately look like they'll fall apart at any moment.





On the heels of the Wagonz I decided to roll with it and see what it would look like on the Epic 40K Great Gargant. I love the goofiness of it so I knew I wanted to paint him like a huge Goff Boy so colour choices were easy. Another quick job but one I'm pretty proud of as it's my biggest epic model painted so far.

With the bug still going I've managed 2 more bare-bones Warbands, a Stormboyz Warhorde of Kommandoz (EpicUK), and a few odds and ends.



2150 points painted so all in all a very productive month! Plus due to some happy EBay karma I've got another ~4000 points of Orks to paint which means my goal of having an army of them ready for Wrath of the Tyrant in Leicester in October shoud be achievable.

On the table I'm loving the way Orks play. They have a fantastic laid-back style of generalship. Double everywhere until they're close enough to assault. Nice and simple. Admittedly my successes have been limited so far but they've been heaps of fun win or lose. I'm generally makng my opponents have to fight their way out of their deployment zone while the pressure mounts turn after turn. The only struggle at the moment is when small fast units manage to break through and run around my rear areas contesting objectives and such. Catching them and eliminating them is a challenge currently.