40k

One of the goals of this blog was to help me keep track of how I painted my models over the years. I’m no good at colour matching the way Wappel does, and I do rely on a recipe even if it’s a little haphazard sometimes. I went back a long ways through my ork entries to find that I hadn’t logged how I painted orks, just orks. I remember it was something wacky and crazy like a dark green highlighted up with a brown to make them more foresty and less bright green.

At the same time, even if I had found it, my technique has changed wildly over the years and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go back.

So I present to you, my “first time painting orks”. 😛

GW Warboss Green highlighted up with a shitty drying Ushapti Bone. The nice thing about the semi-solid Ushapti is that I put a brick into the green, and then broke down a little more of the brick for each layer.

This is the shaded basecoat step, as I’ve been doing.

I’ve been putting off starting these two because I’ve been waiting for Glart to come in the mail and I didn’t want to start something and not finish it. Glart had been get his act in gear because I need him in 15 days and I want him painted! By the numbers, he should have been here sometime last week. This week he’d better be here!

I went from 0 painting projects to 5 on my desk, within the span of a week. I played a game of 40k, which inspired me to work on some killa kans I found in my bitz box. I also assembled 10 grots to fill the 3-Troop minimum I needed for the army.

But then I realized I should finish what I started — the gorkamorknaut has been looming in my ork case for a year and a half. After last we saw this model, I painted it a watered down silver, blue and orange and then had a game with it and realized it was shit, and looked like shit and left it alone for a long time. With 8th ed out, Orks are in a great place and this guy is looking awesome and feeling awesome and deserves some more love. Here’s a photo of where I left it.

I sent that photo to Clayton, who suggested I pull out my airbrush and do it in similar colours to the rest of my ork army, which meant a lot less silver. And since I moved, airbrushing is a lot easier — I have a deck I can do it on, instead of needing to pull everything down into the apartment parking lot and being super awkward and cold. I promptly masked a bunch of stuff, pulled out my blues and went to town!

After I was done, I was feeling pretty good about the whole process. Airbrushing isn’t as difficult as I think it is! I can do this!

…why the fuck is this piece highlighted upside down?!?!! 🙁 🙁 🙁 With the masking tape on, I had mistaken bottom for top and this is where I got. I pulled all the airbrush stuff out again after work and tried to fix it. Unfortunately, because it was a little cold and because I only had the one piece to paint, the paint wasn’t drying as quickly as my patience needed it to, and so I ended up with this strange speckled pattern from paint being blown around. I thought it looked kind of cool…and then I tried to put another layer over it which gave the arm almost a complete sharp edge where I’d previously had a speckled gradient. God damnit. I put the piece down, hoping it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and put my stuff away and went to bed.

Woke up early this morning, looked at the arm and no, it looked like shit. Baby was still sleeping, which was odd, but fortunate so I pulled all the airbrush stuff out again and repainted the arm a third time. I started to worry that it was getting to thick in layers, but I think I’d rather to thick than shittily highlighted!

Here’s a photo of all of the pieces all done, with the masking tape still on the arm, and it is properly highlighted.

I did a quick sepia wash on the klaw arm and edge highlighted the head to see how I liked it, then put it all together to check it out. Looking good!

Funny story about the kustom force field — somewhere inside the naut is a magnet that the KFF sticks to. I can’t find or figure out where I glued that magnet so that the KFF would stand on the outside! (just realized my old photos from a year ago show where it goes :P)

Looking forward to finishing this guy! (but a couple other projects have priority, for reasons you’ll see)

This is an intimidating project. I don’t truly know where to start with it. But I think probably it’s a lot of silver and blue.

I’m not 100% on being finished. I look at certain other members of my community who have built entirely new things with a ton of crazy gubbins. I just put tracks on the standard ‘naut, and sure it was a lot of work and a cool conversion, but the top part of this model is just stock.

Any thoughts?

Didn’t have much time last night, so I just did some shims. The nice thing about this approach is a few things: I create a nice smooth surface to decorate (rather than cut-up Rhino innards), and I can check the fit on both sides of the shim to ensure it works. A problem I was having with the Rhino treads as-is was that I was never certain how much coverage (for gluing) I was getting — every time I went to check, the tread moved a bit!

I’m going to need to do a lot of gap filling. Both of these models were built by other people, and those people didn’t take as much care with good fittings as I would have preferred. Anyone have good materials for filling gaps? My go-to is green stuff, but the way I use it tends to create rounded pieces rather than straight-across pieces. Maybe I just need to overfill and file back.

I love this part of modelling – the fast and furious slicing and dicing of $50 models! I grabbed a Rhino from my bitz box (I have spares in case of Ork conversions!) and a hack saw and cut it in half.

I hadn’t built the start of the ‘naut (I received it from a friend), so I had to pull the legs off rather than just not gluing them. I cut back the Rhino halves until they were just track, and then cut up the “equipment case” in the back of them so they would sit flatter, and then cut up just in front of the middle so that the ‘naut doors would still open properly.

I wasn’t super happy with the “closed” look when I was done last night, but when I looked at it this morning I’m pretty stoked!

I think I’m going to get some plasticard glued to the back of the track portions so that I can try to create a flat gluing surface. There’s so much texture on the ‘naut, and so many recessed panels on the inside of the Rhino that I think any glue-job I did that didn’t include a lot of plasticard shims would fall off very quickly.