Ready for pillaging!

After several years of delay, procrastination, and "oh, squirrel!" moments of other-project distractions, I finally have one unit of a horde of orc infantry.

A phalanx of orcs!

As mentioned in the previous post, I started this project over 5 years ago.  I was using washes for batch-painting army-sized units, so the basic job on these guys is really rough.  I did some touch-ups, and I experimented with some newer techniques on their equipment, but, overall, these guys are relatively low-grade in terms of paint quality.

But I'm cool with that.  This unit is only intended to impress with bulk, numbers, and pointy sticks, in a mass-combat fantasy wargame.

The basing is worth mentioning.  From the get-go, these guys weren't going to rank up well in a square-to-square formation.  Because the models are positioned diagonally on their slotta-bases, the front spearmen would have been fighting sideways!

An adjacent line-up has the front spearmen fighting to the side.

I had the models individually based, intended for a movement tray, to make sure the unit would be compatible with Warhammer Fantasy.  Now that I don't have to plan for individual model removal, I could have fixed the models to the tray, independent of the slotta-bases.  However, the project was too far along to shift to that basing method.

With the magic of scratch-built, magnetized movement trays, I can position the models in any orientation.  All of this effort for flexibility is overkill, however, since I won't need to remove models as individual casualties.  One of the first "corrections" I made to Warhammer was to have the rules for Mini Mayhem keep the models on the tray.  Several years later, Kings of War introduced the same idea to the general market.

Magnetization allows the front spearmen to face forward.

Sure this unit would look better if the models were fully integrated and fixed with the tray.  But this unit is just a filler unit.  And it was a test case for color scheme, technique, and basing.  Future units will look better aesthetically.  But this project counts as a functional achievement.  I finally have a horde of orcs to put on the table!


So here's something that's kinda cool.  I'm pretty pleased with how the iron wristband turned out, painted with the non-metallic metal (NMM) technique.  The circled wristband on the right is the one painted with NMM, compared with the TMM one on the left, painted with metallic paint.  The NMM is more convincing, to my eye!

I'm pleased with how the circled wristband on the right turned out, using the non-metallic metal (NMM) technique.

That said, the armor and weapons are painted with TMM, and those elements look better with TMM, I think.