Rogue Trader Orks for Orktober

Rogue Trader Orks for Orktober?  Well... sort of.

Apologist at the excellent Death of a Rubricist blog has done some great work converting current model plastic Orks back to the look and feel of the old Kev Adams Orks from the early days of Rogue Trader. 

Inspired, I set to work building and sculpting a couple of orks... and then the project languished for quite some time, with the poor boys waiting on various details to be completed.  The bandy legs really were off putting, and as my kid put it the "flipper hand" that most Orks have to hold boltas with is just really terrible. I managed to get them to the point where I was willing to proceed, and then in a burst of inspiration got them painted and based.  

So in addition to sort of a generic RT Ork looks, these two are rough (very rough!) copies of particular poses from the RT ork range, as can be seen below. 

I would like to make enough of these to muster a little squad, but I am not sure I can manage the energy to make it happen.  We will see. 

Next time, back to 15mm?

Christmas Ork

Click to see how big it can get

Here is my only completed figure for 2012, an Ork I painted to give to my wife for Christmas.  I had good intentions for painting this year, and started out pretty strongly when I was rushing to complete figures for the D&D game that I ran back January... but I barely put brush to figure in the past year, and did not end up finishing anything.

This ork, being a gift, had a deadline, and consequently I was forced to hurry it up a bit. I woke up early every day, and stayed up late every night for a week, realized that I was still behind, and started painting at lunch time at work as well.  The figure is a conversion of the nob that comes in the ork boys box, and consists of something like 36 parts, and a sculpted hat, so it was a bit fiddly to put together.  The peg leg in particular made it hard to balance.  My wife hates Eldar, so I got a spare helmet and made a ripped spinal cord for it, and now he stands on it.

I painted it with my usual mix of various vintage Citadel paints, and some Vallejo as well, using mostly a 00 liner brush I got for $1 at a craft store.  The long bristles were pretty useful in painting in all the freehand work, and allowed me to use thinner paint than I would usually use. The wash was a mix of Citadel black ink, craft paint matte sealer, and Future, and then I painted some of the highlights on top of that.

The overdone base was my wife's favorite part

 

Hopefully the results are worth it.  The base still needs a few bits of grass or flock, but it is otherwise complete.  Unfortunately I  managed to not get a clear shot of the bit I was most proud of... the flaked rust on his power claw.

You can sort of see the effect here

On another note, I really need to work on my figure photography, because now that I see these on the big screen, I notice that parts of the figure are out of focus, and that the figure is not lit as well as it could be.  I used my light box, but with natural sunlight, which seems to have been insufficient.  Look for an experimental photography series sometime in the future...