I started this gang a few months ago, and ended up pausing it in favour of other projects, and also there was no need for a Necromunda gang while we were in lockdown. But as part of my effort to clear the WIP projects before the new year, I wanted them finished.
It's a pleasing visual contrast to my more dour Enforcers, and I'm super happy with how they turned out.
These two character figures from Heresy Miniatures are wonderful and on purchasing them I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do.
The car was a find from an eBay seller who does resin vehicles and it's close enough to what I had in mind to work. The floor pattern is a roller from Greenstuff World and sci-fi enough to satisfy my needs.
I don't paint Ultramarines often. As a chapter they don't appeal. But this sculpt, as part of the Conquest subscription, was too nice to pass up. I like the "right, enough of this nonsense" pose as he steps forward.
Basing deliberately black as I plan to eBay this to help offset the hobby spend this year, and want it to be available to anyone to add to their army.
And so, here we are. The full army, finished.
Total time spent was 120-130 hours. Many corners were cut, and if you have a good look up close, well some of it would benefit from a little more time. But you know what? I'm delighted with the outcome from a month of painting. It's a whole army on the table!
Over the last couple of weeks the most frequent question asked has been how I've managed to push through my army so quickly, to a reasonable standard. This week I wanted to cover some of the things that have allowed me to get so far on this project in a decent time frame. And apologies for the repeated use of "me" and "I" in the below.
Elephants
A phrase I use in my day job is "how do you eat an elephant?". The answer, of course, is one bite at a time. But initially it seems so daunting to look at a mass of unpainted figures and think "I have no idea where to begin" or "I can't do this".
I'm 84 hours into this project now, in around four weeks, with just over a week left, and have applied a few key learnings.
Deadlines
Set a deadline. If you don't set a deadline, you'll definitely miss a deadline.
It started from realising in mid-September that I had enough unassembled Orks to make an army, and Armies on Parade wasn't until end of November. That crystalised my thinking when I could look at the finish line, and did two things - gave me a target, and made me realise this was going to be ambitious. That's exciting.
Plan Big
I wanted as many figures as possible on a board, completed in five weeks and to get here I had to decide what mattered from the outset. That meant army composition - for me that was simply to assemble everything you can find the drawers. For my Orks, green and yellow are the most important elements because this is a Bad Moon army. Everything beyond that wasn't of importance.
I want characters and vehicles to be the focal points. The rest are grunts and just need putting on the board.
As I want to assemble and paint every Ork model I have, irrespective of the deadline, this means I'm going to make significant strides toward this amibition as the project progresses. That's also exciting!
Plan Well
This informed my thinking on colour, which I've outlined in a previous post. Reds and blues for shadows, yellows and greens for basecoats and highlights, grey and ivory for non-metallic metals. That means seven or eight paints on my desk, and that's it. They're going to look great.
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Let's pause here. I now know what I want to do, how to approach it, what I'll get out of it, and what's needed to achieve it. That's without doing any painting, but now I'm excited and clear on what to do.
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Test
I painted a test model. It was a fancy individual model. It took me about four or five hours in total. I'm very pleased with the output. It has sat on my painting table as my little reminder of colour scheme, and how cool everything's going to look.
After painting a single test model, I applied the same for a whole squad, but following the guidelines below. This allowed me to try and fail. For example, my original approach was painting yellow first because it's the key element - but this led to me flipping it around to get trivial and unimportant elements completed first.
**
Let's pause again. I now have six figures finished, a firmer idea of how my scheme works, an idea of time needed to achieve a standard of finish I'm happy with, and feel vindicated that my plan has worked out.
That means I've tried and failed on a few areas, tweaked the process, and have an illustration sitting in front of me for what I can achieve. This is motivating! Now it's time to distil that into the advice for painting everything else.
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Set small goals
Every time I wanted to paint, I set an objective for the session. Start from a single goal for that day whether it's "drill the bolter barrels for everything", "base the display board", "finish a squad of five", "edge highlight a vehicle" or "paint the skin on ten Orks", and I painted until that goal was met. Some days that was an hour, others it was three or four hours. It meant the painting session was completed and a tangible output was sat in front of me.
Budget time wisely
Just because we have a goal, doesn't mean you have infinite time to complete it. I work full-time and have a family, so at most I have three hours at night to do other things. That time's precious and must be spent well.
Instinct
First thought is often the best thought. I don't have the time to overthink and noodle around. So if I thought "where does the highlight go", instead of analysing each piece under different lighting conditions and trying to match it perfectly to other models, I just put paint where it felt right to put it! That's not very scientific, but it works. More importantly, now you can do the next one the same and the consistency across models will help to sell the effect.
Compromise
I want an army on the tabletop, not an army being entered at a competitive painting event. So don't try to paint it to that standard.
Technique is secondary to output. Don't stop to craft perfect layers or smooth your blends There isn't time. Keep to the concept.
I opted to paint the metallics as non-metallic, and not doing it with metallic paints and washes. You may not want to take that approach, but I was happy to create "pound shop NMM" which passes first glance as perfectly fine, and nothing more than that is necessary.
Priorities
Paint inner areas first and fast. No, still not quick enough, get faster. For me, after trial and error on the first couple of units, I opted to use brown or a grey onto fabrics and shoes, quickly, then left cleaning up for when I applied the yellows and greens that mattered to me.
Bigger brush
The brush you're using right now is too small for this project. Get a bigger one. The majority of my painting has been with the equivalent of a W&N size 2 or 3. I do not respect or treat my brushes well. Specifically, my two main project brushes are a cheap, large, synthetic brush bought as part of a large pack, so about 50p for that brush to get base on and a nicer Kolinsky Roubloff for most of the work covering a smaller space, which cost about £2 and is a remarkable workhorse.
The bigger it is, the more space you cover with a single stroke. The less strokes needed, the faster you progress. Make your own phallic jokes at this point, because honestly ... it's all here.
Smaller brush
When I do need precision and finesse, I've gone back to my Broken Toad size 0 for detail work. It's the last brush to touch each model, and only used on teeth, fingernails, eyes, and reaching areas that are visible but not easily reached with a chunkier brush.
Cheat
Undersides of most of the models aren't painted very well. I don't
care, because none of us will be turning this model upside down to
inspect the triceps or underside of the jaw. Why waste time painting that area? Because it is
wasted time you could have spent on painting another model.
My Gretchin are all wearing a single strip of face paint. Want to guess where there's an awkward mould line on that model? It would take me five minutes, per figure, of prep work to get rid of that to a satisfactory standard, which impeding the sculpt, so leveraging it as a guiding line made more sense.
When you see the final army, please note the number of times there's grass or flowers in front of feet and boots. I don't want you looking there, so you can't. That's saved a lot of time offsetting lack of neatness for a perfectly fine set of feet.
Finished not perfect
There's a joke in software development: 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.
It's falling into the rabbit hole of dragging something from finished to perfect that can make or break a project like this. If you spent two hours painting a model to an acceptable finish, why are you spending another two hours to finish it all over again? Don't.
You aren't looking at the army and deciding if the straps or boots are painted well, so don't paint them well. Your eye is taking in the scene, then picking out the detail I've painted to lead you toward looking in certain places.That's enough. So put the figure down, declare it complete, and move to the next.
Your rank and file should all be 90% models. Don't spend a minute more than necessary.
Celebrate
Every time another model rolls off the production line, remember you've done something pretty cool here. Add it to a unit. Admire the unit growing and looking awesome. Skip the usual self deprecation you probably subject yourself to, and enjoy the result of your hard work, and remember it's another tick on the list of done.
When the Ork 4th edition rulebook was released in 2008, it rekindled an old love of the Orks and that quickly spiralled into our gaming group jumping into 5th edition and enjoying Warhammer after a few years
I never built any Burna Boyz, as the Lootas were my preference for a heavy weapon, but adding them to the army now is a real pleasure.
I'm using the check pattern on large surfaces to break it up and be more interesting. It's fun on missile warheads, and good for weapon surfaces.
Rokkit Boyz don't have much in the way of armour. But what armour they do have is yellow. Lot of fabric on these models, so I gave them lots of check patterns for a bit of interest. When everything's painted and on the table, the heavy checking should differentiate them nicely, but remain coherent in the army.
This unit also features a sneaky Death Skull, as a little tribute to Warbringer who has spent the last two weeks saying "you're painting things yellow, but blue are the best orks".
So now we have a basecoat of yellow in place, we can start to see the task ahead. It's definitely yellow, but without edging or highlights, it's quite dull. You could certainly go "it'll do" for a challenge like this - but that isn't what I want.
Before we get into detail, I want to mark out areas to be check patterning. Couple of reasons for this. One, cleaning up any accidents with black will be a real problem when I have yellow highlights in place, so getting this stage out of the way now will help me. Any overpainting can be cleaned with the basecoat yellow, Scrofulous Brown, with very little effort.
It also lets me see the effect and check it doesn't overpower areas of the model.
With the test model done, it's time to hit the other models in the first wave of batch painting. Small panels on vehicles, heads of rockets on troops. I wasn't brave enough to try fancy swirling patterns on the rockets, but happy the check effect looks good.
There's a high chance I'll come back to the checks later and make the colours less stark. White and black really stand out on the models, so they will likely be overpainted with a cream and brown mix later, but leaving the pure white as a highlight and pure black as a shadow.
As part of my batch painting process, to avoid a sinking feeling when staring at a wall of unpainted models, I've grouped them into units. Painting one area of each unit at a time. It makes the process feel less monotonous, and across an army it means the colours will have a little natural variation between them
This is the near-finished yellow on the first squad. Simple highlights on key edges, brightest areas where the light would hit it, and a mix of the red and yellow for a mid-shadow colour. At the moment it's hard to discern if the effect works without other colours around it, so time to create a skintone.
Reapplied the red upper areas that were lost with the yellow airbrushing stage, then using Slimer Green and Livery Green, the skintones are added in. Really happy with the effect at this point. Character already coming through.
But how does it work as a mass of bodies? Pretty well! It looks like a unified army already, even with only the two main colours of interest in place. The red and purple tones on the unfinished areas look pretty good.
Sure, lenses are only a small detail but they add a lot of fun to the figures and help to break up the surfaces. Happy with how these tests turned out, so now we have a process that can be applied to the rest of the army. This is the original red and purple, then a little ivory in the highlights and dots.
An alternative check scheme in a low impact area to see if I like the effect more or less than the stark black and white. I like this version more, so now I have a plan for the future to update the checks.
Slowly getting the rhythm for painting groups of models. I feel this is tabletop level, quickly. Which is what I need for this many models.