The greenskinned Orcs are a brutal and savage species;
hulking, powerful and possessed of a low cunning
often underestimated by their myriad enemies.
Well hello, hello! It's time again for The Art of Caesura!
This is a special week and it has been in the pipeline for quite a while now (I actually finished it the day before Hallowe'en so I WAS in time for Orctober!)
Anyway, even long term readers may be surprised to hear that my first love in miniatures is all things Greenskin. My first army for Warhammer Fantasy was Orcs and Goblins and I have quite a collection of them (and many more still yet to be painted). I think my main draw to Orcs and Goblins was the diversity of the army; in a time when most armies consisted of ranks and ranks of very similar models (oooh this one has a spear...this one has a great sword...this one has a short sword), the Orcs and Goblins had it all: Giants, squigs, small sneaky goblins, big hulking orcs, awesomely armoured black orcs, zany doom divers, blue trolls...and the list goes on!
It's funny to reflect on today, because I would consider the most popular modern incarnation of orcs (Ironjawz) to be one of the more homogenous armies now. Oh well. Moonclan Grots are on the way.
I have never really featured my old orcs on The Art of Caesura because this blog is very zen and is all about the present - models that I'm about to / in the process of / or have recently painted.
So it was a nice return to form to paint a good ol' classic Orc, and what better Orc to paint than this Forgeworld offering: The Orc Warboss from the Orc Command. (The keen-eyed amongst you may remember seeing this guy on the blog before...)
All of the paints have changed since I painted my Orc army (back in the Goblin Green days) so I just started afresh. I began with his skin, using a mix of Warboss Green and Steel Legion Drab. I washed this with a mix of Biel Tan Green and Agrax Earthshade before building it back up by adding more and more Light Flesh (Scale 75) into the Warboss Green / Steel Legion Drab mix. I used pure (diluted) Light Flesh on his lips and ears.
With the skin completely finished, I moved onto the rest of him. I recognized that the other bits (chain-mail, armour plates, furs etc.) would all benefit from an Agrax Earthshade wash, so I base coated the whole rest of the model (Leadbelcher, Screaming Bell, Doombull Brown, Steel Legion Drab variously) and then washed most of it with Agrax.
All of the steel / iron was washed with Nuln Oil instead of Agrax and his left pauldron (shoulder armour) was washed with thinned Drakenhoff Nightshade instead of Nuln.
Why did I wash his left pauldron differently than the rest of the steel? Because, and I only noticed this while I was painting it, this orc is wearing a human breastplate as a shoulder guard! I really really love this kind of stuff. That's what orcs were all about - re-appropriating. Once I noticed that, I discovered other small details - like his two elbows are protected by helmets! I tried to photograph them below, the left looks like a dwarven helm, while the right is maybe a chaos marauder!
So that was the process, now take a look at the product with a nice badlands base and bit of Art of Caesura mood-lighting.
Another fun detail that I forgot to mention, is the squig skin covering his axe! the teeth are even nailed to the axe and the eye is visible on the top side, and stitched up on the under-side!
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| See the breast-plate protecting his shoulder... |
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| ...and the Dwarf helm protecting his elbow! |
I used two orc skulls on the base to imply that he's fighting over an area where orcs have been eternally fighting; as is their wont.
And there you have him! I'll have to russell up his buddy the standard bearer sometime and finish this dynamic duo!
Be sure to tune in next week for a very special miniature on The Art of Caesura. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it might just be the best I've ever painted...Woah!
Watching: Ozark season 2
Listening: The Hazards of Love album - The Decemberists
Reading: Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England - Lynne Olson
Next Week:
The boss of the Barak...
It's not a orc warboss if it's on a round base. It's betraying the roots of original Warhammer and O&G.
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