New Orks and Goblins

Well today I've decided to be lazy and group these two painting blogs together. That should actually work out OK as they compliment each other in that I paint two sets of fundementally similar models very differently...



Bogrut's Blackspiders ready for war



First up we've got these ugly little beasts. They're goblins I've got from the Orc Battallion boxed set, and I named them Bogrut's Blackspiders. There's going to be 30 of them eventually, I think, but this will do for now. Two things I'd like to draw your attention to: First, the skin. How I did it was inspired by an article written by John Blanche in White Dwarf a few years ago, where he was talking about how he was painting some Orks he was working on. The idea is to give the skin a translucent quality to it, to suggest that there's something underneath the paint, and how he does it is that he paints Snakebite Leather (a swarthy sort of brown colour) mixed with a bit of white and a dash of Thraka Green over a white undercoat to begin with, then washes it with Devlan Mud, a wash that was sent by God himself. Then mix a little more white into the Snakebite Leather and paint that over the raised areas of the skin, and wash the whole thing down with Thraka Green. I know it works because I saw the Orks he'd painted in the feature, but I found myself thinking, 'if it works for 40K Orks, why won't it work for Warhammer Orcs and Goblins?' So I gave it a go. There's a few varieties of Orc and Goblin in any different army. The Orcs I'll probably keep as the article has written, but for the Goblins, I felt I had to add a little more white into the second mix of Snakebite Leather to bring out the lightness of the skin. I think it worked really really well.

The second thing is the colour scheme I ran with. This was partly inspired by John Blance, partly by Stevie T from Games Workshop Dudley, and the idea is to limit your colour pallette. For the non-artistically minded among us, that basically means don't use any more than a certain number of colours, in this case 12. That was Steve's contribution to it, as he tells us it's a real skill with painting to pick twelve colours and just use them for the whole model, or set of models. It's a bit of work, and as you'll need to do some mixing in order to get away with it you do need to have an awareness of what works and what doesn't when you're mixing colours, but the results are well worth it as you have a limited selection of colours tying the whole thing together. This is the idea that Blanche tries to get across by only using a very small number of colours, five or six. But if you look at the guy's painting, it tends to have a real gritty, dirty vibe to it; natural earthy tones made up largely of browns mixed in and out. I've used a few more colours than that but I think I've got the sort of muddy, flithy effect I was looking for, and one you'd happily associate with Goblins. The other thing about Blanche's painting is that when he does use colours that are any more vibrant than greens or browns, they tend to be for decorative purposes only. In this case I've only used one colour for this - Red Gore. Most of the eyes are red, and the tassle at the end of Bogrut's sword is red as well; there was one more but I can't remember what it was and I think it's hidden behind the standard bearer.

The whole '12 colour' thing seems to be working well for this. It's not necessarily going to be as easy to do this with every army - I wouldn't like to paint Brettonians in this way, for example, though I'm sure it's possible. But for now, it seems to be working as well as I need it to for the goblins.

So when you compare it to these:

I've spent a while painting these Orks. Basically when I worked for Games Workshop and I could afford to buy paints, I ended up with near enough every colour, and I'm using about half of them for these models. I've talked about these before so I'm not going to go in to too much detail about them, but the inspiration was from a couple of White Dwarf 'Eavy Metal articles, one on painting Ork Skin which I can now paint better than Human Skin funnily enough, and one for painting the Skulltaker. The elements from the latter ended up in the metal elements, and the black leather. You can't see it too well here - my camera was running out of battery when I took these so I couldn't use the flash - but by comparison to my goblins, these have a rather vibrant, 'cartoony' look to them. Steve was kind enough to tell me that my choice of colours worked really well for this; I have to admit it's something of a lucky reflex but it comes down to this: The bright colour of the skin works very well with the yellow clothes. It wouldn't necessarily have worked as well if I'd painted the skin the way I'd painted the goblins, or the clothes. The two styles wouldn't go all that well together. But because I've used all these vibrant, pastelly colours together, it makes the whole scheme work.

Just time to show you my conversion: when I put together these Orks I wanted to do something a little different to what I usually do, and that is to take some time to think about what I want on the model. Before, when I worked for Workshop, it was all about getting it together as quickly as I could so I left off a lot of accessories. Missed out a bit, though, and so now that I'm doing these Orks I'm putting all the accessories on them now (within reason, obviously,) and worring about how long it's going to take me to paint them later. For the most part, out of 32 models there's no so-called 'kit-bashing' going on in any but 2 of them, this being the second one where I used the power claw from the Ork Nob as a bayonet. Granted, in gaming terms it would be better employed as a power claw, but let me ask you this: Do YOUR Orks have bayonets?

The other conversion, by the way, was one of the Gretchin. I might tell you which one another time!

So, what's next for these armies? Well right now I'm working on an Orc Warboss and Goblin Spider Riders. I was actually painting the Warboss in parallel with the Goblins, but what happened was I stuck a little Snotling on the Warboss's shoulder and forgot to paint him, so I'm doing that with the Spider Riders. It's going to be interesting to see how those spiders turn out, because I've left our what might be considered to be a lot of the necessary detail; I think I'm going to have to get some reference material or at least some help in order to fill that in - and keep it with the colour scheme and the spirit of the army. For the Orks, er, that's going to be put on hold for a while. I meant to get some new ones the other day and I forgot. But the army list needs re-working, 70-something models in 500 points might seem impressive but I can't see it being any good if I'm honest. I might need to re-thing the theme of the army, though they will still all be in yellow.

I've actually got some other projects in the pipeline; I've never painted these models before so I'm quite excited about this! Looking forward to showing y'all.

See you next time!