Orctober fest

 

Since this month's subject for the Bits and Bobs Challenge is 'Heroes' I have a bit of space to complete some extra 'rank and file' for last month as well. It's orctober, I need to do orcs, they're not really heroic now are they? :D

These are all Bob Olley Mountain Orcs currently available from SHQ Miniatures (except the armoured guy at the centre of the top image, he's RPE) and are joining the bunch I have already painted for my non-green orc army. They're pretty big chaps, I have half a mind to count them as ogres.

These were a late addition to the army as I picked them up in a cheap ebay lot and they have lounged around at the back of the shelf for two years whilst I waited for the impulse to get back to finishing the army. They're all open-handed sculpts and came with a selection of weapons so I was able to bend arms and give them different equipment for variety. Sticking with the same basic colours as the rest of the army and trying to keep them very muted.

I've also added to the ranks of the goblins in the army. The unit has a kind of hobgoblin/Mongolian vibe so these Giaks fit nicely.

Most are Citadel Giaks, one of each, with the same red eye iconography as the previous models. These are such lovely models to paint. The poses feel really natural despite the limitations of two-part mould metal casting and the character and detail in the faces is wonderful.

These three are a pair of more recent Giaks (from Minifigs) and a Grom's Goblin Guard whose equipment and face blend in perfectly. This little chap was a gift from a generous BOYLer, I forget who but thank you!

Orctober fest

The Metal Quest continues...

Some more special Heroquest minis for you today. An orc for orctober, necromancer for halloween and an 'orrible troll. One of the upsides about being vocal on platforms about your collecting of Heroquest prototypes is that occasionally people contact you saying they have things... Both the necromancer and orc came to me this way whilst the troll was a gift from Mike @ Broadswords and Beasts. I had to modify him slightly to fit on a 25mm base! 

The necromancer makes 3 out of 5 of the wizards miniatures, still the high mage and man at arms to find. I first came across this miniature in the undead armies book where he (a metal one I asusme) lurks in the background of an army image:

Since he was clearly in the studio army at this time I went through all my White Dwarfs to see if I could find a better picture of him, but no success (only the same photo duplicated). The previous two necromancers I have painted I used the cover of Wizards of Morcar as a reference but for this guy I decided to go as close to the WD image as I could, giving him a more corpse-like complexion and orangey robes. This was helped by my recent acquisition of 'British Redcoat Red C' from the Foundry paint range after about a year searching for a yellow-shade red rather than the somewhat pinkish 'Bright Red'. As you can see from the comparison picture he's somewhat larger than the eventual plastic piece (as are the orc shaman and storm mage), as opposed to the prototypes of the base set minis which are smaller than the plastics and which were my guide for sculpting my own homages.

The orc is an extra-special find as I only know of one other person who has one (though likely there are more out there). There isn't even the Mike McVey one in the foundry cabinet. The rarity can be understood since the minis from the base set never had a general release and with all the great orcs in the Citadel ranges he was never going to be especially eye-catching to the extent that a casting room worker would spin themselves one up. Unlike the gargoyle, chaos sorcerer and chaos warrior which would be understandably more popular. I still hope to lay my hands on a chaos warrior one day, having been used as a young bloods trophy at one point there must be a few around. Anyhow, the orc was a lot of fun (and quite quick) to paint. As with the gargoyle I tried to get as close as possible to the box photos but without laying eyes on the actual mini I had to do a bit of guessing as to what the colours were like in reality.

The troll, of course, is not a Heroquest mini. Shakined Bonebender is, however, one of my favourite troll models. Ultimately I'd like to add the Marauder troll that appears in the Marvel special to my collection, but that for another day. I need a HQ troll for an adventure in December and Shakined doesn't really fit with my river, stone or regular trolls so this is the best use for him I can think of. I know he was based on a John Blanche image, I have in mind that he is actually a John Blanche sculpt? But I could be mis-remembering that.

The Metal Quest continues...

We are the fighting Uru Lukinnat!

Happy new year settlers of blogsphere! This Christmas was a bit of a first, with no need to travel and the big day falling in the middle of the first week I had 9 clear days which translated (with a cold and impromptu days out and housework) into a solid 5 days of paintingand sculpting. :)

Thus was I able to expand my Orctober efforts to a mighty 2000pts of not-green skins. The mighty, fighting Uru Lukinatt, greatest goblinoid horde of Morrrrrrdooorrrrrrr! To be fair, not all of these were started and finished in the holidays, the crossbow arrer boyz has been creeping towards being finished for most of November and December. 40 odd goblins and 15 orcs, however, are a pretty good turnover for 5 days, even if they are definitely tabletop standard!

Speaking of standard...

I'm not totally sure, but someone fluent in black speech told me the approximate translation is "Oo are yoo lookin' at? Boris is my aunty", whatever that might mean. I figured it was a good moment to revive a truly oldhammer tradition, putting detested leaders on banners! The stone tablet afixed to the pole carries the regiment's official motto "Break shit, done". The reverse of the banner, designed to spur on the following unit, carries the unofficial motto.

I realised I needed to double my number of goblin warriors to make it effective, but was having difficulty finding an economically viable way of doing this. Luckily I had dug out some Moria goblins to paint and had been playing with Prince August home casting moulds that Harry gave me. The worst thing about both these sets of models was the heads, so I experimented replacing them with the very Angus McBride-style orc heads once released by Wargames Factory. They're oversized, as fits a goblin, and really helps lend them a LotR vibe. A short amount of superglue on fingers and broken knife blades later and...

Not too shabby. I had the bow goblins left, so thought I'd get myself a small unit of wolfriders to harass enemy flanks. Because they have a bit of a steppe goblin look I thought I'd put them on the Tibetan mastiffs I sculpted a few years back, with two huge RAFM wolves as mummy and daddy. Really pleased with how how the poses worked out.

This was also a great opportunity to paint up a recent acquisition. I've had my eye on an old Asgard Half Troll Chieftain for some years and last year finally got it together to collect a small group of buyers together and order from Viking Forge who still make them. He's too small to be a proper troll, of course, but makes an excellent Orcish Warboss.

The rest of the orcs are a mish mash of still-available miniatures and a few oldies I had available. I had ordered from SHQ at the start of December, but sadly still no sign of those despite being assured they were on their way. As it turns out I think I have enough orcs, I was just hoping a few of their mountain orcs might go with Alternative Armies one to make a small unit of Black Orcs and allow me to field my warboss as one. I still have some boarboyz to add, and am looking for the savage orc boarboy boss if anyone has one for trade or sale in the UK. He was my first metal Citadel Miniature, painted in Humbrol enamels and car body paints, and I would love to have another crack at him.

The background, in case you are wondering, was the product of the wife and I having our first lesson with Bob Ross to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Still lots to work on (it really isn't as easy as it looks!) before I try to tackle anything specific, but works nicely for a soft-focus backdrop.

The photo at the top shows the whole horde, this shows just the figures completed since Christmas (including 14 arrer boyz started in November).

We are the fighting Uru Lukinnat!

Orctober Fest 2019

I painted some orcs.

I realised that I only had two sets of orcs- my Goblinoids set which live in their nice display cabinet and my Heroquest orcs. What I needed was some gaming orcs!

Sadly prices of classic Citadel orcs seem to have gone up even more than when i was doing the Combat card thing a few years back. In fact I don't think I could have begun to do that project with today's eBay prices for these chaps. There must be thousands of them around, I guess people just love them and hang on to them. I did have a couple kicking around and managed to pick up a few broken models but it seemed that the best way forward would, like with my undead, be to find old-school still-in-production miniatures. This seemed quite difficult. Most of the available orcs were knock-off red era cartoony without being anything like as well sculpted. Those that caught the look exactly (like Knightmare Miniatures' Kev Adams-sculpted, ex Crooked Claw) are still too pricey for me to get more than a small warband's worth from, I may as well get the classic Citadel ones.

In the end I decided that rather than try and capture the Citadel look I should go for another orcy classic, Angus McBride's LotR illustrations. This was especially relevant as I've just got back into playing the ICE Middle Earth CCG and GW LotR skirmish game again.

Many years back I bought some Wargames Factory plastics to make an Angus McBride orc force, but they were really too spindly in my view to do the job well. For this attempt at an orcy rabble I turned to Alternative Armies, Ral Partha Europe, Denizen Miniatures (Paul Strivens goblins) and a Westfalia goblin that fitted nicely with the Citadel Monster Starter Set I'd wanted to paint for a while.

I think they turned out as a nice orcish rabble.

This is all I've managed for Orctober, I have another 40-ish orcs waiting to go (archers and boar riders mostly) but time is in rather short supply at the moment. Nor are these strictly finished, there are some details left to pick out and a couple of broken weapons still to fix. I want to put a big banner on the Monster Starter Set ogre. They'll do as my Orctober contribution though. :)

The orcs (and goblins) on the right are based on 20mm slottas and will probably count in WH as goblins but to my mind they are all orcs. After all, Tolkien didn't draw a clear distinction and there are clearly orcs and goblins of various sizes in his writings.

Orctober Fest 2019

New art and forthcoming posts

It's nearly the end of October and the second gaming highlight of the year (for me anyway) is nearly upon us... the annual GROG Halloween game, Night of the Living Lead. Every year the tiny Bretonnian hamlet of Shitz Creek is beset by necromancers searching for the powerful pumpkins which will allow them to raise the ever-growing numbers of undead from the multitude of graveyards which surround the unfortunate village. This year I believe a coven of witches has entered the hunt for the renowned squashes...

 

Not only is it the end of October, but nearly the end of ORCtober too. I have not been idle but have been (appropriately) back to work finishing the shields for my Goblinoids project. They'll be done by the end of the month so stand by for mass photo dump!

 

Preparations are in progress for the launch of the Factious Waste Live Campaign, War 1984, which can be found here. All-comers welcome. The pdf rulebook should be available in just over a week's time and new artwork, funky scenery and gorgeous miniatures have been procured to adorn the pages of the physical book which is pencilled in for production in February. I've dug out some of my steampunk costumes for some digital pieces to grace the pages with. Credit to me ol' mate Sultan at Sulty's Photography for a good number of the original shots here!

 

Last, but by no means least, I have some very cool sculpting commissions on the go right now. The See Thirty Amazons are back on track after a long hiatus, a couple of political characters from the past year are getting miniature representation and I finally get to tackle some Realm Of Chaos stuff! It's going to be a fun few months!

New art and forthcoming posts

OrKtober- Full Moons on Halloween...

A month ago I pulled this little pile of soon-to-be-greenskins out of a box:

 



Nice little project, RT Ork army in a month. And now it's the end of Orc(k)tober so it's all finished. Errrrr.... no. But then, as someone rightly said on the forum, what self-respecting Ork has a calendar?

So what did I get done?

As you can see, most of what was assembled in the picture above is at least underway. There are loads of boyz still on sprues and I haven't got to the bikes or wagons yet but I think it's not bad progress for what little of the month I had free to spend time on them!

 

 

Sticking with the Bucky O' Hare theme these two toads... er, Orks!... have been painted up as Air Marshalls. Actually it was these miniatures painted by someone on the forum (I forget who, sorry) that first put me on to the idea of a toad/Ork army. I was going to Toadborg-up the old SM dread but since the Nobs were in that scheme I decide to pain him as another Komplex-to-go to kompliment the warboss. There are also 12 more Boyz in this lot which I did last week.

 

I'm currently painting Gretchin, which will be done tonight but since the light was going about 5 I had to snap some shots before it got dark. The Goff Rokkers probably won't get finished tonight, they're among my favourite models ever and I want to pay proper time and attention to them. It seemed fitting to start them on Halloween though, listening my way through the entire works on The Mission (in preparation for going dancing to some good ol' Batcave classics tonight, hooray!).

In addition to painting I ACTUALLY PLAYED TWO GAMES (!) with these guys on Monday night. Using 7th Ed rules but nevertheless, I have never played as Orks before and it was a refreshing change from my much-abused Guard force. Yes they got pummelled, but gloriously and appropriately for Orks. The Nobz held off and butchered two squads of Khorne Berzerkers and a squad of Chaos Space Marine Bikes before they were brought down and the hopeless carnage of the second game was only because of a Stormraven Gunship....

OrKtober- Full Moons on Halloween...

OrKtober: Kaptin Komplex and the Borgaaarghz.

Next offering for OrKtober, the Boss of my Klan, Kaptin Komplex (in blue) and his trio of Mega-Armoured Nobs, the Borgaaarghz.

In keeping with the Bucky Toad Empire theme, Kaptin Komplex is based on Kompex-to-go and the other three on Toadborg. Still not sure whether to keep their backpacks purple or add some yellow in. The cartoon quality of these are making me smile.

OrKtober: Kaptin Komplex and the Borgaaarghz.

Orctober: Nay, ORKtober! The Bad Moons rise.

I've been waiting along time for Erny to bring back Orctober.

Last year I managed to acquire, amongst a lot of other bits, a complete, mint, one sprue set of RT orks. Naturally they aren't staying there! :) Let me present the small horde I intend to work through during Orctober:

That's over 100 Orks and Gretchin, so they may not all get done, but I'm determined to have a good bash. The RT plastics are joined by RT metals, Space Crusade plastics, Bad Moon Nobs, Goff Rokkers and other bits and pieces. Plus, of course, the iconic RT War Wagon. :) Glad I didn't part with that...

I've chosen Bad Moons as my clan. Why? Well because of the Nobs, because I can see the imagery working well with the SC Orks and because I have something special planned for the band. But not just Bad Moons, oh no. Bad Moons based on these guys:

Yup, Bucky O Hare's toad stormtroopers. :) Love the comics and cartoon as a kid and very much want to use this colour scheme for the RT orks with their organic-looking weapons and padded jackets. And I have a good idea for this guy:

Ambitious if nothing else... stay tuned for developments!

Orctober: Nay, ORKtober! The Bad Moons rise.