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@Gobert: Darn right!

@theCrowe: lol, 8 views and 2 votes for all my efforts sounds about right

@Olthannon: I looked at blue camo schemes online to make sure I got the blocking as close to real as possible, I'll take your comment as a sign that I at least got close

@Cam: Yeah, but we all know your "quick and dirty" blows my "month worth of effort" out of the water every time : )

and now, since it's been a month since I finished him, I suppose it's time for a proppa update on the Comms Boy.

<Crackle of static, some feedback, and then indiscernible shouting on the other end of the line>
Comms Boy: Wot's dat boss? Right then, you got it!
Kommando Nob: Wot'd 'e say?
Comms Boy: 'E sez, "More dakka, den get stuck in and krump 'em proppa!"
Kommando Nob: Pffft, typical.
Comms Boy: Why, you got a better plan?
Kommando Nob: 'Course I do. I sez we drop down dat ravine dere, sneak up on da fort, and den slit dere froats while deyz sleepin'.
Comms Boy: I like da sound of dat, proppa sneaky like eh?
Kommando Nob: Dat's right, proppa sneaky like.
<Loud feedback, and more irate indiscernible shouting on the other end of the line>
Comms Boy: Er, is dis fing still on? Yeah, 'course boss. Nah, we'll do it your way, 'course we will. Kommandos out.

I've been using the kommandos box as an opportunity to try out new techniques, and had this guy basecoated when I decided to give my hand a try at OSL since he actually has a light on his gun and all. So I went back and blocked out the areas that I thought should be reflecting the red light with white paint on primer, then started layering on dark red and highlighted up from there. Then through watching videos, I learned about the notion of making the scene that the mini is in night time to explain how the lighting effect can be so profound and started mixing blues into the highlight colors of things like his skin tone. For a first attempt at OSL, and as a learning experience, I consider this effort a success although obviously I could continue to refine the effect on this mini and my technique still has a long way to go. I'm calling him done though, and the funny thing is that on the tabletop, all of my orks are in the desert in broad daylight, but this guy is so sneaky, it's perpetually night for him. Pics:

I really like the OSL, it’s come out super effective! I hope it’s helped you appreciate your lowly coms ork that wee bit more. He’s a nice looking mini.

Fantastic. Brilliant work , especially the camo and osl.

Okay, so big catch up time.
Finished the Octarius Kommandos Snipa Boy but not in time for the "That's not a gun..." challenge.
Picture a rooftop in the war torn far future of the 41st millenium.

Now picture an ork sniper.

Now picture an ork sniper on a rooftop in the war torn far future of the 41st millenium.






I didn't like the fact that this guy's pose put his gun below the level of the base meaning it was under the ground or something, so I landed on making the base look as much as possible like he was standing on a rooftop with the barrel hanging over. It also allowed me to leave most of the base completely uncovered, as the natural texture is kind of roof-like anyway.
Have you ever had a mini where the more paint you put on it, the worse it got? He was that mini. It all started with a spray primer disaster wherein the spray paint was coming out of the can intermittently in thick blobs. Me being me, rather than test on a sample piece of cardboard or something after repeatedly attempting to fix the problem, I doubled down on a bad situation and kept spraying more gunk on him until most of the detail was filled in. This left him kind of blobby and awful to begin with, and subsequent layers of paint really only served to fill in more of the sculpted details, which is why he has that "my first mini" look (and apparently I missed painting one of his teeth too, no excuse for that one). Anyway, he's done, and I'm more happy with the base than the mini. I also tried to Zenithal highlight this guy since I'm trying out a different technique for each of these kommandos so far. I only had zandri dust instead of a light grey or white, but he's a kommando so I figured khaki was appropriate as a base coat. I probably just should have left him in the primed state as some kind of artsy sneaking around in the dark thing since painting him was all downhill from priming on. I did learn a bit about the way light hits things from the experience though and will probably try it again in the future (better luck next time, eh?)


I also finished the slasha boy that I started back in September. Since he already had blue, black, and green on him, he didn't get entered into the October competition, but I did finish him within the month. I'm super proud of my paintjob on this fella, and his special technique is my first foray into NMM on the gun and the knife. I fink 'e looks dead sneaky:






In general too, I'm trying to think more about source lighting which is actually kind of liberating since you don't have to highlight the whole miniature, technically only the side that the light is coming from.
So what's next for ol' Gulgog? Well, I just had a birthday and got another box of kommandos, which is fantastic since I was hemming and hawing about building the special weapons lads versus some of the alternate builds which in some cases I actually like better (like the fella below), so now I can build both with reckless abandon!

He's locked, loaded, and got everything a kommando could need.

Oh yeah, and with these last two done, I now have a full squad of 5 for games (no more proxy kommandos for me):


Thanks for stopping by, hope you like them.

Fantastic job. They look fabulous. I think you nailed that nmm.

Cool set of sneaky boyz, they look great as a mob, soon to be a bigger mob too!

I got a game in and realized as I was making my list that what this squad really needed was the nob, so I glued him up and painted him for the December competition (Action Jackson will just have to wait). Since I have a second box of kommandos, I'm thinking I might try a bit more converting with the next batch and maybe even try to make them freebooterz or something, we'll see. Without further ado, pics:

He looks an ard lad! Nice job

Love coming here and feeling proper orky.

Well, in keeping with keeping da boys in line, the other thing I noticed I needed more of when list building for games was bog standard slugga/choppa nobs. So for those of you who come for "that proppa orky feeling" and stay for the inane ramblings of a madman, I present this based and painstakingly base coated bog-standard ork slugga/choppa nob:

...and some inane ramblings:
I wanted to capture this stage of the process for a number of reasons. I'm not really a conventional wisdom (or any kind of wisdom for that matter) kind of guy, because I learned to paint minis in something of a vacuum before the advent of the internet and for a while I prided myself on having a unique style that wasn't something I learned on YouTube. Admittedly, I have been watching a lot of YouTube tutorials lately, and after fussing with the minute details and new techniques on the kommandos, I wanted to do this guy quick and dirty and see what following the "standard rules" of painting got me.

1. I used the biggest brush possible for every section and didn't worry too much about crossing the lines where one color meets another. This works a lot better than my typically obsessive stay in the lines and use a pinstriping detail brush for everything approach. Cleanup at the intersections of each color only took a single half-hour painting session.

2. I pretty rigidly adhered to an inside-out method where I painted the deepest recessed stuff first and worked my way outwards. This too worked really well, but was also only possible in large part because I premeditated what color I wanted every different section to be. I often start with the boots or the skin and decide what color each section will be as I go which I think is in large part why it takes me so long to complete a mini; I am frequently affected by artist's block.

3. This guy was a pre-assembled GW free mini of the month and I suspect that he was glued together using plastic glue rather than super glue so removing him from the base or fixturing different sections to paint separately wasn't an option. On a mini this open, I don't think I would have painted him in sections anyway, but I do like at least doing my bases separately - he does look a little sunken into the terrain which I don't like and it's a pain to glue flock around the feet. It's also a lot easier (IMO) to remove mold lines and sprue chunks before assembly (no care whatsoever was spent by the assembler in this respect, although given the number of these that the GW employees have to churn out last-minute, I'm not placing any blame). Lastly on this point, to paint him I mostly just held him by the base or the tip of his slugga for as long as I could get away with it but eventually I had to glue him to a cork because I noticed parts of the paint were rubbing off in the more handled sections.

4. I focused on getting him to a fully base coated state before doing any washes, highlights, or other effects. He is now "battle ready" in that every section is at least the base color it's supposed to be. For example, I considered doing a checkerboard on his left shoulder pad, and may still do so, but rather than leaving it blank, I slapped a bunch of leadbelcher on it figuring that it's metal anyway, and I could paint over it rather than leaving it bare primer until the details stage. Now that the base coat stage is completely done, I am going to go back and wash, highlight, freehand, whatever.

The funny thing about all this is that I'm still probably at least six hours into this paintjob and nowhere near done. I paint-on primered him white since it's too cold and rainy here right now to do any spraying outside which means that he took more time than he could have if I had sprayed him black and featured more black in the color scheme. I've been looking at the ork nobs on the GW website and frankly, it's a little disappointing how little time they spent on the box art for this kit - spray black, leadbelcher all the metal, green skin, and add some washes and checkers and call it done. Although if I want to improve my speed (which I do), I'll probably have to make similar concessions. This guy already has 9 colors - 4 shades of brown (leather, wood handles, khaki shirt, horns/teef/nails), silver, brass, red, black, and blue. I'm going to get him done over the next couple of weeks and enter him in the January Dakka painting comp.

On a non-ork related note ( ), I saw a picture of a Skitarii squad on the Dakka homepage and was like, hey, that looks a lot like the ones I painted! Turns out it was and I had forgotten I had even taken the picture. Meanwhile, it's been garnering nearly 2,000 views.

It's interesting to me how the internet works in this respect that as something sits it accumulates distribution. The views and votes I get on this site are far more a function of duration than sensation.

Anyways, thanks for stopping by, I'll post the final pics of the nob before the end of the month.
(/rant)

So after bitching about GW's lack of detail on their nobs, I did the obligatory washes and highlights on this guy and honestly kind of lost my momentum to keep adding detail.



So I slapped a few decal glyphs on his shoulder pad, stuck a bosspole in him and called him done. (The bosspole thing is another item that came from in-game experience; my last game it was really nice to be able to easily differentiate the nob in each squad because they all had bosspoles even though they're not technically wargear any more in ninth). I actually finished him a week ago, which is record time for me, so maybe there is something to not overthinking each mini if you are trying to build up a horde army. I hope you like him, he was a blast to paint!











Oh yeah, it was my first time using tufts too (much easier than bunch grass). I wanted to make it blend in a little better than it was in its unpainted state, so I tried adding a wash of agrax earthshade which made it clump together more than I would have liked. Next time I think I'll do the same because I like the effect on the color but I'll water it down a lot more.

Thanks for stopping by!

Oh, nice nob! Good and grimy.

Oh what a great Nob you have! Honestly though great job. Really like him. I think it's a difficult balancing act with the details, yes they are a character figure, but they are way too prolific to paint each one to golden standards for a large army. By the time you have a decent squad of them and they are added to each and every unit, they are adding up! But then again all your models are too a high standard so to make them stand out a little is hard.

Time to finish out this squad. I've got 6 boys and the nob makes 7, so another 3 will round it out to 10. I'm going to try to paint them in a batch but I've found in the past that I don't really have the patience for three (two works, but three at a time?) so we'll see how it goes. There's two more bog standard kommando slugga boys


...but the real update is this fellow. I've wanted to know how compatible the new monopose kits are with the old school ork boyz, so I set out to convert one. The last ork I painted up got me in the mood for a more dynamic pose, and I noticed that one backpack in the kit has no explosives in it, which can only mean one thing. This guy's got the charges in place, and the whole thing is set to blow, so he's beating a hasty retreat. Ever seen an ork in full sprint? Despite what the Ghetto Boys may have to say on the matter, this fool can run fast:






As you can see from the copious amount of greenstuff on his sides, the answer to "how compatible" is "not very to not at all". Arm swaps should be a cinch although you do have to file the kommando arms flat to mate with the old torsos and greenstuff over the ragged bits since the old torsos had torn sleeves while the kommando arms have proppa sleeves. The head requires quite a bit of drilling material out the back to fit the neck into but can be relatively seamless. The bedroll on the backpack majorly gets in the way of the legs and while I was trying to join the torso to the legs I realized that I prefer the newer more upright look over the old stick out the booty style, so rather than chop off the bedroll, I put a fairly long pin into the torso and greenstuffed a pretty huge gap.

As usual, questions and comments welcome. Thanks for stopping in!

Reading through this thread has been a lot of fun, I think you give your orks a lot of character and it really shows. I can't wait to see what you'll be up to next.

Your sculpted squig was my favorite.

I feel like we need to see this crew in action in some kill team games.

Procrastination time. I am doing a genestealer neophyte for this month's Doomsday themed challenge, and between a bunch of travel and work stuff, I'm having trouble finding the motivation. Also, I'm noticing that the nice thing about the new scale orks is that as my eyes get older, the details are about as small as I can see/paint whereas these 'oomie-sized minis feel a bit too small and fiddly. I'm hoping to find my muse and get some paint on him but in the meantime, ork kommando photodump!

These are the last three orks for my first box of Octarius Kill Team Kommandos, so after 10 months painting an average of a mini a month, I now have a complete squad. I can't escape the feeling that I would have gotten more votes if I had time to take and post these pics for the competition but again, work and travel and stuff prevented me from posting anything more than a quick snapshot of the three together. The other thing with photographing and posting is I remember that there were a couple of bits I still need to go back and paint (looking at you bloodaxe insignia on the slugga and teef on the backpack loops). At any rate, I hope you like them:
























Other planned procrastination activities include learning how to do a compound image in Photoshop so I can put the whole squad together on one page.

Thanks all for the comments, it makes my day to know that people are interested in my hobbying.

That urban camouflage pattern is great!

The camo on those looks really good! How did you paint everything to the same size and shape so well?

Thanks for the comments all, glad you like the camo, I had a lot of fun painting it. It's pretty simple really, I basecoat the entire area to be camo in a pretty neutral blue that subsequently gets washed with Drakenhoff Nightshade which turns it into the dark blue. Then I pick either the light grey or the light blue (doesn't matter which) and create the little patches of color, aiming to fill ~1/3 of the area. Lastly, you take the third color and fill in another 1/3 of the area, overlapping some of the 2nd and 3rd color while keeping in mind that the dark blue counts as the negative space.
It's a bit of a cross post, since I posted this on the finished minis thread, but here's the group shot of all of them together:


I gained some pretty crucial PhotoShop experience doing this collage and love the way they all look together as a squad.

Now it's on to something completely different. For last month's painting challenge (Doomsday), I painted up a GSC Neophyte Hybrid with a heavy flamer. I wanted him to look appropriately industrial and grimdark, so I went with the safety orange jumpsuit, and did what I'm calling a "reverse highlight", basically adding brown to represent mud anywhere that he might have scraped up against the walls of the mines. I wish I had time to further the details on each of these, but I don't, and they're not worth enough points in game to justify fiddling with them endlessly. As usual, C&C welcome. He's the basic color scheme I'm going with for the whole squad, and I have another primed up for May's competition (although I have even less hobby time this month than last).











As an aside, if you are reading this and don't participate in the monthly painting competition here on Dakka, you really should. It's extremely constructive and not at all competitive (in the sense that you have to be a great painter or anything). I credit it as the primary motivator that keeps me on my mini a month pace (slow though that may be, it's better than zero minis a month!) and the community that participates and comments is a fantastic group of folks.

That's a beautiful group shot mate, well done. Must feel great to have them all done and be on to the next project!

I've never ventured into the painting comps on Dakka - mostly becuase I'm lucky if I'm actively painting for 2-3 months of the year - but I will head on over to take a look for some inspo at least - thanks for the tip!

Nice work on the kill team, they all look great together! The GSC dude is looking nice and grimy too, the brown dusting works well

Thanks all for the comments!
Here's another cultist for ya:








I'm having fun painting these, they go pretty quickly now that I've figured out the paint scheme that I like. I also gave this guy a bionic arm because the painting challenge theme last month was "Mistakes Were Made" and I figured an industrial accident would add to that. Also, despite being a super simple kitbash with a bit of greenstuff work to make it more believable, it was a good reminder that half the fun in this hobby is making each one uniquely my own.

Here's the update on my current state of the hobby. For June's centennial-issue "Celebration" themed painting competition, I decided to bring the fireworks with this little guy:









Guess what?

Squig Butt!

I was super-pleased that in the voting thread comments, people picked out everything I was going for in this mini. Subtle fade from purple to orangey-red, check. Custom basing elements, check (someone even said the base looks like a "mini-diorama", which is about the best compliment you can get on a base IMO). Little details like the burning fuses of the dynamite, check. Bugged-out eyballs and captured the utterly deranged look of this sculpt, Check!

Then for July, I couldn't find the motivation for hobbying. The comp theme was "renewal" and coincidentally, there was a thread here on Dakka discussing the current state of INQ28 which I've only somewhat recently discovered, and each time I delve into, it renews my interest in pursuing a smaller-scale, more narrative version of the hobby complete with kit bashes, conversions, and the "average human in the grimdark far future" scale. This rekindled my interest in progressing my GSC Kill Team unit and I found in the kit a hand with dynamite in it. Continuing on with the theme of a company of miners slaving away in horrible conditions, and prone to industrial accidents, I figured the backstory on this guy is that he was told his job was setting charges to dig deeper into the crust of Vigilus ("What happened to the last guy?" he wonders) and in a not all too uncommon incident, lost most of his face when a charge went off too soon. I'm increasingly liking the idea that not everyone in a GSC army is actually tainted by Genestealers, but rather the appeal of joining up with the rebellion and casting off Imperial oppression could capture the imagination of anyone with a grudge and a dislike for their current living situation. So maybe this guy is part alien, or maybe he's just a pissed-off average Joe. Here's the kitbash (sorry for the blurry photo, my phone is usually much better than this, although admittedly, I did not break out the tripod for it since it's just a proof).

However, the competition theme was a tie between "Some like it hot" and "Suns out, guns out" and since I have an ork kommando wiv burna that I could build up for the former, and this guy better fits the latter, he may be waiting in the wings for a month before he sees paint and joins the revolution. Thanks for dropping in, and stay tuned for more!

Two months behind on updating, so I daresay it's high time to revisit the ol' painting blog.
Last month's challenge was Some Like It Hot (dangit, I had just finally gotten that song out of my head too!) so it seemed appropriate to paint up the mini that suckered me in and sealed the deal on that Octarius Kill Team kommandos set.








...and this month's challenge was Sun's Out, Guns Out so I figured I'd paint up another starchild waiting for the big day to arrive.










I looked up a few lens tutorials on YouTube and the funny thing with this was that every single one had effectively the same method for painting round lenses, no variation whatsoever. Not surprisingly I suppose, because it's pretty foolproof (I am the fool in case you need proof). I even nailed the other eye so I'm no longer intimidated by painting tiny 'oomie eyes, although admittedly, I'm sure it's much easier to paint one than try and make a matched pair both looking in the same direction:


I'm always trying to up my basing game too, and lately my thing is to try and put the miniature in a setting that relates to their situation. So everything in front of the burna boy is charred or actively burning, and I put this fellow on a pile of rubble. If you ever want a reminder to be grateful that you don't live in a warzone, do an image search for "war rubble". There was an article in a 28-mag I read that gave me the idea for the broken glass, and it's a cool effect that I plan on using more of in the future.

As always, questions, comments, criticisms (and of course gallery votes) are welcome!

Still knocking it out the park bud.

Great stuff. Love the old school battlewagon; very jealous you have one! Subbed.

The effort on the bases is really clear, the charred on the burna boy is cool , but that broken glass is awesome! Is it just cut up packaging?

The lense is really great on the last guy too

Apparently, while I slept my own little corner of the web quietly crept past 40k views which is pretty exciting. Thanks all for the views and comments over the years!

@gobert: yep, just cut up packaging. Dig around in your recycle bin with an eye towards something that is clear, flat, and the kind of thickness that isn't too flimsy but that also isn't too thick that it'll seem out of scale. Cut it into pointy shards (aka triangles), then just glue it on.

Once again, I'm cookin' up somefin' speshul, but the way things are going, this one's going to be a WIP in the ol' mekshop for a loooong while, so it may be radio silence from me for a bit. Thanks again for stopping by, it's really great to get this kind of support for something that I love doing.

I almost forgot, I finished another two cultists, too:

Cheers, I’ll look out for suitable packaging and give it a try sometime. Cultists look cool, and colour me intrigued by the big project… WIPs are always welcome in this corner of dakka!