Ork of the Rings: Orkship of the Ork

I managed to eek out a little painting and work today. Unfortunately I still have my silly ear infections so I'm too tired to sit and paint for long periods of time. I just managed the second layer of colour over the orks skin. Yet again I only managed to start taking photos when the sun had gone away!

I used 1:2 Snot green:10%F on all the fantasy orks

But boredom hit right about this point and I decided to see what happens when you add gloss medium to a matt paint. The result is quite cool - I've thought of quite a few uses for it already like the dirt and grease on mechanical parts and shine where sun hits.

I'm not sold on the different colour - using snot green is surprisingly different. Should be able to make good use of it though and highlight the skin up nicely. Gloss has also been quite nice for putting the models together, snapping a photo, then referencing that for exactly where the light hits in different positions.

I have lost the ork I used the iridescent medium on... hopefully nothing to do with the 'medium'.

I used my winsor and newton brushes today! Galleria brush set rather than series 7 - I'm still too scared to open those.Good for normally thinned paints (great, actually) but not after I had added the gloss medium.

Too tired to keep writing...sleepy byes!

Finished Ork pictures!

Finally got some pictures of the first set of models I've ever finished :D

I also came across an Eldar ship based of Elma the elephant Elma

Orky Progress

I started the day by cycling across the city and back to get some iridescent medium from hobbycraft. And some PhD chocolate chookie protein powder. I've been feeling very drained and exhausted the past week, hopefully starting exercising again and topping up what I eat and drink with some shakes will get me back into things! Been having so much trouble actually sitting down and painting, and doing my uni work.

But! Being exhausted to the point of crying can't stop me completely - I managed to bang out a couple more steps on my orks and get photos for my stripping tutorial done. (Hehe). Dad is going to pootle about with me tomorrow and get some nice high quality photos done for the prepping and priming tutorials as well - he does fancy photography with a massive set of lenses so hopefully they'll be decent!

Oh and uh... my problem with the camera yesterday was that I had actually put it onto manual focus mode, when I thought the M meant macro. Woops! Just don't tell anyone and it won't matter.

Onto orkies!

I did all six leather boots with a layer of 1:1 VMC flat brown, taking care to only paint on the raised layers. This gives the boots a really nice shaded look in the creases thanks to the underlayer of scorched brown. I much prefer this look to washes the shading in on leather boots. VMC flat brown has a slight reddy hue to it giving a nice depth to the leather look too.



The metal and the soles of the boots will be done last



The colour shows up really nicely on the black primed orks to, but I forgot to take a photo. Vallejo model colour seems much more highly pigmented than citadel paints, and also a much creamier consistency. Very nice to work with.

I then went over the black ork's trousers with more 1:1 iyanden sun. When that was dry the models were all give a devlan mud wash - quite a thick one. Devlan mud is a really handy wash colour but I find it most useful in larger amounts. When I've run out I'm going to make my own out of inks and post about it because it's really too expensive to buy and then use like I am. The ingredients to make it whenever I want would work out much cheaper overtime than rebuying devlan mud.

Anyho - I left this to dry for a while. Devlan mud is really important for defining the orks skin and muscles. The wash and knarloc green paints work perfectly together. I started washing and the sun was up, by the time it came to taking photos the sun had set.



All the skins washed up and left to dry




It has really brought out the definition of the muscles



Added a great deal of depth to the face - brought out features that were flat before



Depth to the colour of the trousers, and dirt. Shades the red fantastically as well.

Once I had gone back over the trousers with iyanden sun, I dabbed my brush in devlan mud again and pushed it gently into the creases, adding to the shading. I was careful not to get it elsewhere lest I have to touch up again!

That was it for painting. Earlier in the afternoon I helped boyfriend clean up with dettol stripped miniatures. I worked out one of the paints that the guy had used as a base - car spray paint! An iridescenty-non matte black car paint. Wasn't even primer. Been a nightmare to get any of it off. We've left them as they are because it seems after hours of arduous scrubbing and soaking and spraying chemicals on, this is the best we're going to get. A couple of them are clean, a few haven't had even the tiniest bit of paint removed, loads have this horrible car spray on, and a bunch have smidgens of paint left on them.

Fear the smudgy forces of Chaos!

Sprayed a few and have left them to dry overnight in the tiny painting greenhouse. Boyfriend used my priming guide :D

Finally the dog got bored of us not playing with her and decided to intervene in the painting activities

Hopefully I'll be feeling more awake and active tomorrow and I'll get a chunk of painting done! Sleep well my friendly neighbourhood ghost :)

Oh I forgot to show off my new iridescent medium! I shall do so tomorrow!

Home Sweet Home

Today the boy and I came home again. Currently set up in the PC room again painting some orkys! I'm doing a basecoating guide using the orkies at the moment - I have three black primed ones and three white primed ones. Literally at the moment - I'm reaching over my painting stuff to type this!

I've started off basecoating them with 2:3 knarloc green to water, over all their exposed skin. As you can see I only needed a tiny bit of paint to do this; certainly much less than if I'd used it straight out the pot! Thinning your paints properly, oddly enough, makes a little go further than alot!

Here you can see how little paint I used. I used two lots of that volume and managed to do my two coats of green on the complete skins of 6 orcs. Above you can see the difference in the tone of the white and black based ones after one coat. Thanks to the wonders of lazily and stupidity I primed these orks so badly that I've actually ruined some of the details and depths of the model. Really crappy to paint on now - but oh well! I ruined them, I should finish them.

It was shortly after this point that my ability to take photos took a nose dive, and then the battery in the camera died. Probably of shame. So I don't have many useful pictures of the process between there and all basecoated, except for this one when I was hit by a solar flare;

Looks like an ork boy band

Luckily we all survived and I was able to finish basecoating!

You know you love my mustard pants

The yellow is Iyanden Sun - thinned the same as knarloc and two layers applied. The red on the white ones is just 1:1 scab red:10% flow, two layers. On the black ones its 1:1:1 scab red:mechrite red:10% flow. Oh and the boots are 1:1 Scorched brown:10% flow, two layers. There's a really nice grainy effect over the white - you could utilize it to make the boots look worn down and scraped.

Because I want the metals to look dirty and used I popped a quick basecoat of 1:1 chaos black: 10%F over all the white model's metal bits in two rough layers.

I'll finish writing this post later when I've got some decent photos to show from my painting. I can't take photos to save my life at the moment - I can get 1 out of every 10 crystal clear, the rest is blurry. I'll get on with updating some other pages on here instead, and take some proper photos in the sunlight tomorrow :<

Melt Man, with the power to Melt!

So still didn't have a chance to paint today - too much work to do, and packing. Heading home for a couple of weeks tomorrow. All my lovely brushes and paints are boxed up. As is all my underwear... damn!

I have 6 orks basecoated though; 3 white and 3 black. I need to do an update post with the chaos marine army I won off ebay on. It's huge for the price I paid, but good god loads of the models are in a hideous stat. Badly glued - it looks like most of them just had superglue poured on! Random bits stuck on- gun stuck to the outside of hands, the torsos of one model stuck onto the tiny legs of god knows what. Some have been basecoated, some haven't. Some have been painted with a billion layers, some have just been sprayed gold like tiny chaos-oscars.

It's going to be a hell of a lot of work to sort out, but worth it in the end :)

We tried out a few different paint strippers this week. Tried engine degreaser - managed to create a new ork model 'Mr Melty', tried fairy power spray, works awesome on metal models, dettol antiseptic, works awesomeon plastics! Originally wrote spastics there, glad I caught that :o

Also James' dad decided to help by taking out a little khorne berserker and power spray hosing it around the garden. The dog was very confused. Little spaniel is curently half shaved and looks like he has mange. Will get pics tomorrow.

Orky orky orky

Well I am useless and didn't post everyday. Been swamped with work and non-pastic glue related problems. I finally finished my orks and took some photos of them during the brief period the sun was out today though.

Don't have much else to add today - I'm too exhausted! Primed some orks in the laziest way I have ever done, so they are going to be al fuzzy and blotchy. My own fault though, took something realy easiest and just couldn't be bother and my reward is orks with flat faces. Also covered my left hand in primer; still haven't gotten all of it off!

I did try something different this time. I had removed the ork parts from the sprues and removed the mold lines (Also lazily - they all look like... well, like they've all been attacked by giant files) and then stuck the body parts to a cut off piece of sprue to prime and paint them on. Made priming them nicer rather than trying to cover everything while it's all glued together.

I must go snooze now, got lots of work tomorrow (and hopefully painting!) Have some blurry orks

Swatchy swatch swatch

So today I had to go to uni and back to drop a form off - 5 hours on a motorbike was not fun! But while at uni home I picked up a few things - namely the rest of my paints! Spent today doing swatches of them. Not done much more than that. Apart from 3 or 4, and the foundation paints, I have all the non-metallics I own done. I will be doing the metallics in one go once I've finished them. Gonna do them with different mediums to show what differences they make!

Nothing else of interest really.... Picking up some black, white, grey and red halfords primer tomorrow! Had a huge second hand chaos marine army turn up today that I need to strip and file. Fun fun fun...

Sleep time!