Ahoy!
Another mob of hornswagglin’ bilge-rats a-ready to voyage cross the stars ter Ferrograd, where they be a-searchin’ fer booty!
There is a lot of love for the original Rogue Trader era ork models, such as 5/6 of these. I havent ever really cared much either way about these old guys before now, but they are working out well as scruffy space pirates I think. In turn that is making me take more of an interest: I can feel a certain fondness for them growing as I paint them.
One of the guys in this group is a Marauder miniature, from 1990ish, one of the only 40K releases that Marauder ever really made (Im not counting Confrontation miniatures that were only available at a US Games Day or whatever it was). I would like to get the rest of those old Marauder orks. There are only a handful and I did like like painting ol’ bigface.
This brings the running total of Skallywags to twelve, with at least that many more in the immediate pipeline, including gretchin, some characters and some objective markers.
All twelve scurvy lads to date.
Filed under: Miniatures | Tagged: 2014, 40K, 40K Skirmish, Bigdogz, Freebooters, Orks, Pirate, Sci-fi, Skabsquigs Skallywags |
sho3box 
Lovely work once again. Nice to see this old range getting sone love.
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Thanks John. The range is quite flat (as in very much designed to be cast in one piece in a classic old toy soldier fashion) and even compared to most human models of the era the RT orks are small, but they have buckets of that ephemeral charm. Like me 😉
Gretchin, some objective markers and more personalities next, with some melee weapon armed, boarding action equipped guys up after that if I can keep the momentum up.
Im tempted to use these at Brocon actually, but if Seán is fielding orks then I dont want to double up.
Thanks for the feedback.
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Some fine colouring in there mate, it’s great to see these classics with such nice and modern paintjobs. I expect my orks to be a bit more oldschool in the paintjobs, and not look half as nice. The stark contrast style you have really works well, and it seems you have cranked it up to 11 lately! Looking at the pants, the yellow stripes almost look like NMM gold. =) Top stuff!
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High praise from a straight talker like you Mattias, thanks.
You are the second person to recently describe these as “modern” paintjobs. I cant work out if its just because these models are usually seen in paint schemes that are literally twenty five years old or if something about the style of painting that I have settled into recently is inherently “modern”. I dont know.
I do know that if you told me that I had to paint a set of miniatures that feature black, red, yellow, green, blue, silver, gold/bronze and ivory/cream (and some light grey white on occasion too) on each model I would tell you where to go. But I seem to be getting away with here for some reason 🙂
When you say that you plan to have you orks looking more old school, do you mean a lot of grimy metallics? Or something else?
I like aspects of the application of the paint to differ from area to area on the model where I can. Even if its done nicely an entirely drybrushed or entirely layered or entirely blended model can look homogeneous. I like to break that up.
In part I dont tend to paint metals using an NMM technique because I like how the different nature of metallic paint can break up the layered areas, but it interesting to note that a high contrast finish is in some respects the basis of a sort of all over NMM technique.
I was talking to gnoks on Reaktor Miniatures about his NMM gold a couple of days ago. Although he took a lot more care painting the NMM gold on the figures that he showed than I did on the trousers on the Skallywags, it is a broadly similar approach to the one I took, although with the gold it goes from a darker, browner base.
Thanks for the feedback 🙂
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I’m not really planning anything per se, but I expect my orks to look a little simpler technically. The high contrast style you employed here is something I assosciate with modern painting. As is the tightly controlled palette. Possibly even the chipped, worn armour. The look is similar to salt masking or sponge daubing. Old techniques, but not popularized (to my knowledge) until “recently” – so in my mind kind of modern.
I think of oldschool paintjobs as rather simple paintjobs (ofcourse there are decidedly oldschool stuff that is anything but simple, but that’s more like an exception to the rule). Like the one I did on “Papers”. Basecoats colour-shaded with inks, heavy reliance on drybrushing, things like that. Sometimes, poorly coordinated, with slightly clashing colours on the verge of garish. The ones on your orks are very tight, the red isn’t dominant. You could’ve painted the red almost flat keeping just the black in the nooks and deepest crevices. The skin could’ve been goblin green with a dark green ink wash and then highlighted with goblin green and goblin green + yellow of some kind. Top it off with goblin green bases with the old sawdust flock and THAT would’ve been more “oldschool”. =) Not that oldschool is in any way better. A nice paintjob is nice, regardless of style.
PS. I installed a few plugins on my blog which forced me to start using my wordpress profile… hence the weird account I’m using from now on.
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WordPress plug-ins availed of 🙂
AN interesting break down of your take on old school. Well observed and pretty comprehensive I think. You plan an holistic sort of old school paint job on your orks it appears. I look forward to to seeing them. Something about those old Adams orks – the more light hearted Saturday morning Thundercats/TMNT incompetent buffoon type of villain vibe – makes them ideal alien foes for the Spacelords range.
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[…] me Skabsquig’s Skallywags for these Battle at the Farm photos. You can see more of them here and […]
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