Painting the Waaagh

This  post replaces an earlier one regarding the beginning of my Ork army.

The scheme is pretty much the studio one we are used to seeing. I’ve looked at a lot of stuff people have done with a more subdued green - which usually means a green that has a higher tint of yellow and brown, and less of a glow about it – but I have fallen into my method and it works for me.

I undercoat black and then do a light green base undercoat for the skin, Knarloc Green/Loren Forest (I’m being nice here and giving the new and old names). I then dry-brush this up to a bright tone with Scorpion Green/Moot Green. At this point what you have is an Ork that practically glows in the dark.

Over that I do a heavy wash or two of Dark Angels Green/Caliban Green. If you were slack about stuff you could get away with that for the table-top. You could use actual washes too… but I find they give too much gloss and I tend to use them on things like boots to simulate the sheen of leather. Just adding more water has always worked for me.

After than I start working it with layers of Goblin Green/Warboss Green and Skarsnik Green, which is just a tad paler.

These last two give it an organic look, it’s quite a soft green. I’ve got solid depth there already, and I then use anything between Caliban and Moot to get the depths and highlights I want.

The overall effect is just a tad fruiter than the green in the codex but not really that different. They’re using at least Warboss Green and probably a couple of the others I mention.

Then I do the face – which I love – and re-black the rest of the model before painting those parts.

I’ve fiddled with colours and seen some nice stuff for the rest of the Ork but the simple Goff thing of dark browns, black, greys and white works for me. It stops the model looking over bright or over busy, and I reckon it looks really cool. So Goffs it is for me, at least as far as my Boyz go.

Orks are really fun to paint. The check-patterns are a little fiddly but not that hard and they don’t have to be perfect anyway – obviously – because these are Orks. If you like doing faces, which I do, they’re a smorgasbord of variety, and the faces are huge. They actually remind me of cougars. The big wild cat, I mean, not Mrs Robinson. I should really get back to Beastmen someday (I painted ONE, many years ago) because they have some of the same cool attributes going on.

So there it is, I’m not batch painting and rarely get to play so I don’t have fill-a-list pressure. Hope you check out my progress from time to time.