A Few Good Orcs

 I've been hard at work at my painting table almost every night for the past week; I've finished five more Warmonger orcs for the first block of 25 Orc Boyz, as well as based the three I painted back in January. That puts me at 20 figures completed, and the last five got primed today. I'm going to redo the unit's shields so that the new recruits match the figures I painted back in 2021, and then I'll post the full regiment once it's completed.

I've gotten a few other orcs finished though, which I will show off:

So this is one of the original orcs I painted in 2021, but I was never super happy with his banner. "Eat Yer Beans" was a weird sort of surreal joke, the idea being the regiment of big, oafish orc galoots had one brain cell between them and it wasn't this guy's turn with it when he painted the banner. It always needed explaining and I was never particularly happy with the flat cream color. Now he's got a very old-school design, though maybe less "Evil Sunz" and more "Mildly Disappointed Sunz" in execution. Either way I'm much happier with this. 

This Orc standard bearer is originally from Heartbreaker Miniatures, sculpted by Kev Adams in the mid-90s, and is currently available through Ral Partha Europe. I'm debating whether he'll be the army's Battle Standard Bearer or replace the current standard of the "Old Guard," a regiment of assorted figures from the late 80s and early 90s that I started in January 2022. He was painted back in January of this year but I finally painted a banner for him tonight. I'm super pleased with how this turned out; the green stippling behind the head really worked out well and the face has a lot more expression than the Mildly Disappointed Sun above. 

Next up is a Savage Orc Shaman that was originally released for WHFB 6th edition in 2000; 6th edition was my introduction to the concept of wargaming and miniature painting, and while I have a strong preference for Oldhammer aesthetics and attitudes, there's something about some of the 6th edition orcs that pulls on my nostalgia strings. I never had this guy back then (as a 14 year old whose prior hobby experience was model airplanes when I first walked into a GW store, I had a strong preference for plastic back then, and only painted a very small handful of metal Warhammer models), but I picked him up on eBay maybe a year or two ago. 

He ended up being a blast to paint, and I'm really happy with how the bone came out, the way his tattoos came out, and little things like the inflammation around his piercings just makes me really happy. All the metal on him is painted as copper except for a handful of talismans on his wand that looked like they were intended to be of dwarven make, which I painted as silver. Also I finished his base after this photo was taken.

I think he's a Mark Bedford sculpt, to go along with the range of Savage Orc Boyz he sculpted for Games Workshop in 2000 for 6th edition; I scored a dozen of those off eBay last week, including two-thirds of the command group; I'll be getting the primed ones and the single painted one in stripper this week in preparation for painting the group myself. I'll have to look into sourcing a champion and maybe a few more Boyz for the unit; it would pull my Oldhammer army in a slightly more Middle-LateHammer direction, but they're attractive figures and a block of 16 (Shaman, full command and 12 rank-and-file) would look nice in my collection. 

This generation of Savage Orcs doesn't seem to get much love or attention at all; there's a lot of pictures online of the early-90s Savage Orcs from 4th edition WHFB, and of the plastic kit that succeeded this line (which is still in production for Age of Sigmar, rebranded as "Savage Orruks" because GW is copyright-happy), but there's not a lot of pictures and info on these figures. They're much, much bigger than the "Barbarian Orcs" I have from Harlequin/Black Tree Design (primed and awaiting paint...*cough*) so I'm a lot more confident trying to do things like paint their furs as tigerskin with these.