WAAAGH! Orktober!
A gang of orcs on a sportsball field was probably a reference to hooligans on a football lawn. I really had no clue about this game but some colleagues told me that Blood Bowl was one of the most liked games of the Nottinghamian miniature company.
Green skins for greenskins
My first idea was to shade the three size classes of the orcs so that the two gretchins were the brightest green, the majority in a medium tone, and the two massive trolls had the darkest green skins. The basis for this was that the biggest minis had more details on the models and a bright skin colour would just take the attention away, on the tiny ones it might work the opposite way.
4BO Trolls
I was really amused by my own idea of this two clowns would be like walking tanks in a sportsball game, so using the Soviet protective green (VMA 71017 Russian Green 4BO) was a twistedly fitting shade for them. As the photos revealed I managed to forget to paint the first one's toes to begin with. I had time to fix this and all other misses.
Plain green orcs
This enormous pile of orcs was processed over a few evenings. I brushed some light reen (VMA 71022 Light Green RLM82) on the heads, arms, chests, whatever was uncovered.
Light green gretchins
Those tiny fools I painted with gently diluted light green (VMC). There wasn't much to paint on them, so at this point I felt my choice of skin tones worked.
Fuzzballs
Because I had no idea what would be the best thing to do next, I started with hair. I gave the trolls' heads, arms, chests and the crap flowing out of the other one's pants a layer of reddish brown (AK11108 Hull Red). Over that I wet blended some slightly lighter brown (AK11106 Mahogany).
That looked like a neat scheme, so I painted the four wolf pelts the same way. What did you mean wolves were more grey than brown? Well, these ones were not!
Wood pieces
There were surprisingly many wooden bits spread around the miniatures, mostly on the shoulder plates and the various barrels, but also on the vambraces and other random shielding parts. I based them all with Wood Base (AK11351) and painted some thin lines with Light Wood (AK11115). This photo didn't include the beersquigs and their barrels.
Metallic metallics
On these tokens I wanted to get the metals to stand out properly so I used a metallic paint instead of my more typical greyscale recipe. Gunmetal (VMA 71072) was a good base, so that's what I used:
Those Valkyrie orcs got some copper (VMA 71068 Copper) decorations on their shoulder pads' engraved runes. In addition to the runes I felt tha the helmet wings had to have a more golden theme, a bit like what Asterix had.
Hell bent, hell bent for leather
My AK wood set had a convenient and usefully named leather colour (AK Leather Brown) so I used that on all the boots, belts, straps, back-protecting discs and whatnot. Trying to follow in the footsteps of actual painters I highlighted their edges with a lighter brown (AK).
After some slowly progressing painting sessions the orc group started looking quite a lot like progress.
Gang division
I had to split these folks into two sportsballs groups but I had not been struck by inspiration that told me how it was to happen. As evident, I was definitely not a sports observer so there was no help from the meatspace here. I just started a red versus blue, because both those were going to stand out against the greenness of the skins.
At this point I ordered some bases from the local GW store in the centre of Helsinki on an afternoon after work. There were going to be a few discs for the tiniest units, a pile for the majority and a few larger ones for the big ones + one of the normies.
Blue orc group
This is what I ended up setting for one of the gangs:
I chose a light grey colour for the He-Man -style furry pants, so I started them with Cold Grey. I wanted them to stand out from the brown fur of the trolls and the future-black beards of the orcings.
The troll of the blue unit got black lenses on his sunglasses and I had this silly idea of turning his pants into jeans. That didn't work out perfectly, and the final shade wasn't that much different from his team scarf even though I felt I had been poking around quite a lot. This dude also had a name in the kickstarter. I also got carried away painting some small details like the teeth and nails. For these I used a pretty generic medium brown - lighter brown - bone recipe.
His coat was clearly a leather coat and I based that in black grey, and then drybrushed with Cold Grey. Later I highlighted the upper sides of the folds with thinned down Cold Grey because I felt the drybrushing alone was a bit too weak to highlight the large shapes well enough.
Those battle dresses of the Valkyrie orcs I did not even think of painting blue, I wanted them to be white. At least they had those lines in the hems that I could paint blue for the team colour, just the way I had painted the bowties in their braids. My approach with the dress was a Cold Grey overbrushing, then thinned down Stonewall Grey, a smaller layer of thinned down Greyish White over, and an ultimate drybrushing with white. While fooling around with the fabrics I felt that they should also wear white gloves instead of having them have bare hands. I also gave them steel-capped shoes because why not?
I got a suggestion to make the Valkürenorcs blondes like Wagner opera singers, so that's what I went for. For the hair I used one of the warm wood colours in the teeth but it was funny how the brain recognized the things correctly as hair despite the colour repetition. I based the flying braids with Wood Base and hightlighted them with that later after I had washed them. When I was poking around I added some more copper onto the shoulder swirls, boob armour, and the bracelets. That was good.
My set had four of these angry meatballs. Later I noticed in the Kickstarter page that two of them (the barreled ones) were for the game, and the others were some sort of team markers. No idea how I was supposed to realize that. Anyway, I painted them all the same way. Based with the Hull Red I then highlighted them with the RLM23 red. On their backs I wet blended some purple-violet. Now they reminded me quite strongly of Cacodemons, which may have subconciously guided my colour choices. Green eyes to top them up, some very uncared teeth, and bright red tongues.
At this point my minis were so far done that I could start washing them with Citadel's stuff (Seraphim sepia for the woods and drinking horns, some Agrax Earthshade on choice planks, and metallics mostly Nuln Oiled).
Like everything else in this project I painted things at random and in very inconsistent sets. When I had come up with the chessboard decoration for the red team I had to do something for this blue team. I wanted the decos to be different so checkers were out of the question. Instead I painted some filled sawtooth pattern along the decorable surfaces, and later on I heard their name: dags. They looked more like sawteeth to me but I guessed they could also be dagger tips as well. All the same, I painted a number of the and was surprisingly content with the result.
During my various painting sessions I had been tweaking and even highlighting the skins quite a bit but something felt off. I orcified them by using my at least 28-year-old Citadel Green Wash on all the skin parts. That took some highlights down but the green was more vibrant and all three main groups were still somewhat distinct in their shades.
There were loads of steps I didn't photograph so the progress behind the scenes was faster than what my text output led anyone to believe. Thanks to the silly amount of pieces the painting was very splintered and spread around the calendar, as I didn't even get one single stage done in one go most of the time. In addition I forgot some little details from day (evening) to day and noticed the fixables when already packing my setup. There were quite a few of the drinking horns, only that one guy had something in his helmet and the other one spilling out. Some kind of a beer brown would've simply been lost in the brown so I decided that these folks were very Capellan-spirited and this one was drinking plum wine. The colour was pretty nice.
Now they started being in a pretty decent state, except for the bases. I had already stepped into the deep trap of fine-tuning so maybe it was a good idea to step away for a moment and then poke at the last missing details.
Red group
I basecoated all the red-to-be things with AK's Hull Red because that was a good foundation for a couple of brighter red highlights. Things like the troll's loincloth and later the foot rags, the pants and some shirts of the orcs, the apothorcary got a red outfit later on when I had first marked the white apron out of the way. The modern-day mint-green protective gear wouldn't have stood out nicely enough from his skin.
These folks also got their furry warmers painted from Cold Grey to an off-white. When I was done with that and the bright red fabrics, I realized I had turned into USian Santa Cocacolaus copies. That inspired me with a team name: Santer'z lil helpaz. Apparently the orcsies needed to speak that way, for max street cred.
Lacking a shirt, the troll got a red skull-band on his bear and some more on his back hair. They didn't stand out that much from his red-brown hair, but I had no one but myself to blame for the low contrast. I also decided that this one was going to wear black leather pants just like his brother had a fine leather jacket. Both articles of clothing were the same: black grey with cold grey highlights. Perhaps I ought to use a satin varnish on the pants to make them stand out even more sillily. Another thing I saw missing were his nasty toenails, thanks camera!
Now the Apoth-orc-ary got the red outfit under his apron. At this point I had also given him, too, white gloves. That forehead lamp with its band was one of the things I simply kept forgetting for some reason. What I had not forgotten were the separate steel soles and kicking dags for his shoes. It would've been even more fun if he wore socks and sandals like a true barbarian.
After several fine-tuning and re-poking sessions later the reds were also in a pretty decent state of life. Those wolf pelts I had poked a bunch of times, adding some diluted black both in the upper parts of the legs, eye area and to the snouts. On top of that I had drybrushed grey in places to make them look a bit less mistailed foxes. Of course I could - and maybe should - have been different and made them fox pelts to begin with!
After applying different Citadel washes (sepia, brown, black) I was again closer to the end. Something had been ticking in the back of my skull, as these folks could've been so much orkier than what they were now, I just didn't know what this missing thing was. Then it struck me: the tiny decorations here and there. I cautiously but bravely added a silly amount of tiny white squarelike blobs to make a chessboard patterns on their shoulder guards and whatnots. I was mimicing my ancient memories from the nineties artwork (both FaBa and 40k) where the orcs always had insane amounts of chessboards. During the very first steps I was certain I was ruining all, but the result was fun. Orky.
I took a separate three-person closeup shot. This had worked better than I expected.
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