Change of Pace

A little vacation from the Motherland.

After yesterday's musings about Orks, today I grabbed a handful and got to painting.  It's not often that I can start and finish a mini in a single day, let alone a group of them, but that's more or less what happened here.  I drop that qualifier in because the batch had been started already, but keeping with my usual style I re-painted just about every bit.  While I know that Orks are a motley bunch and having them be different colors would be thematic, I still like having a consistent shade through bunches, if not the whole army.  Speaking of coherency the Evil Sunz portion of the army isn't speaking to me at the moment, despite what I painted today.  Somehow having the single color (blue) on the Deathskull part works for me more than the dual color (red/yellow) of the Sunz.  My concept for the army would work just fine as a strictly Deathskull force and if I didn't already have most of a squad of Evil Sunz done (not to mention other partially painted bits) then I'd probably switch over to just blue.  Perhaps pulling all the boyz out as a group will make the different colors more appealing.  If I've lost you in this reminiscing, do check the tag cloud on the right sidebar.  I've covered this Orky speculation before, but it's been quite a while.

Klaw detail.

On the painting front I tried something new out.  My default painting approach is "factory fresh," which is good enough for Marines but doesn't jive with Orks.  As such I put in some wear on the klaw by using a method I've seen many times in various tutorials.  I painted the klaw up red as usual, the blacked in the cutting edges.  This wasn't a uniform application but a random one.  To describe from a different angle, instead of painting one horizontal stripe I did a bunch of little vertical stripes.  After the black I repeated the process with the VGC equivalent of Boltgun Metal.  I made sure to leave some black showing and to vary the lengths of the stripes both in relation to each other and in relation to the black underneath.  Finally I used VGC Silver in the same manner but in the smallest quantity of the three.  The results were what I expected and didn't take long to do.  Speed was the key idea with this group.  While I spent longer painting them than I wanted to, I still accomplished my goal of finishing them off in a single day.  The notable exception is the Deathskull Nob, who got his skin finished and a basecoat on most other things.  I won't know for sure until I pull the models out and count, but I think I'm about a dozen models short of having a 500 point list fully painted.  Of course none of them have finished bases, but since I've gone this long without basing them I'm just going to wait and do them all at once.  Depending on exactly how many I have to go, I may try to crank out the remaining models before getting started on whatever the Paint the Target goal is for January.  I still think 40k has some glaring issues as a system, but I do love the models and a little variety never hurt anyone.