Green is the New Black (Ork Kill Team Part 2)

After managing through a super stressful week at work and illness invading our home, I stole away a few hours over the weekend to finally get some paint on some of these silly Ork bois.

It was upon first sitting down, though, that I realized I hadn't decided how I planned on doing the green skin.

"Maybe like an olive green? Or cartoony and bright!? Or a deep blue-green!?!? Or what about, like red or something weird!?!?!?!?!?!?!?"

I'm not much of a planner, when it comes to painting. As maybe my favorite aspect of the hobby, painting is something I typically lose myself in, and I just go with "whatever feels right" at the time. This means I can almost never repeat a scheme and need to paint whole units at a time, I almost never remember to write anything down, and there are many occasions where I look at painted figures on my shelf and wonder how I achieved a specific technique. It's not very practical, I guess, but it's how I do things. 

So, I've decided it's super cool and perfectly fine if all of my orks have variations to their skin tones, rather than being a uniform green across the Kill Team (and eventually 40k force, but more on that later).

Looking through the wonder that is Pinterest, I found basically too many schemes that were cool, so I figured I'd just start trying stuff until I was happy with it.

First, I decided to break out the airbrush to simulate a technique I saw in this wonderful video (though his skills are far superior) where you put on a base green and throw a zenithal highlight using a typical "flesh" color before busting out washes and brushwork. It worked out okay, but ultimately left the orks feeling a bit too pale with the colors I used. Plus I'm going to have to go back and try to really bring out the faces. 

I can't decide if that video just inspires the hell out of me or discourages the shit out of me.

Anyway, after giving everything a wash with some Army Painter Green Tone, I felt like I needed to do some more substantial highlighting.

Josep has had it with Danny's shit!

On the left is an example of a full repaint, using a couple of different greens and some yellow to fully color and shade the grot. It's pretty cartoony and bright, but I like it pretty well. On the right, I only used the Army Painter Green Tone wash and then used some Vallejo Dead Flesh to highlight, and he's a much paler Ork. Liking them both really cemented in my mind that I'm going to just have to have various tones throughout my force in order for me to have a good time with it.

After playing around with greens for a bit, I decided I needed to knock out at least 1-2 of the Kill Team and get them finished. It made sense to finish up Cap'n Sarge first since he's a transplant from my Deadzone force and would only need some touch up and basing work anyway, but it felt like cheating, so I also worked on Beep-Boop.

At first I had his can pretty clean, but if there is a single painting skill that I'm best at, it's making something nice looking become all shitty and grungy and like it's survived some terrible catastrophe. It's my "thang".

"Nooo orkses 'ere... jus' ol' Beep-Boop." 

I decided I wanted for this Kommando to have found some trash and scrap to create his disguise in the field, but when the mission was over, he just never gave it up. He didn't choose the Beep-Boop life... the Beep-Boop life chose him.

So after some GW and Vallejo paint effects (Corrosion and Rust, respectively) and a helping of the-most-underutilized-hobby-material-out-there Vallejo weathering powder, I touched up the edges of the metal again and called him done.

So sneaky. So dirty. 

Next up I'm hoping to power through some more of these orks and finish up the Kill Team, but it's equally likely I'll become distracted and start/continue a different project.

Can't See the Forest for the Trees (Part 2)

Like, what was I thinking with that title? It's terrible.

Anyway.

Had a spot of warmer weather this weekend, so I managed to make a little progress on my "green" terrain.

After cutting out all of the filter pieces and pulling the fibers apart to make them work, let me offer a few words of advice: 1) The little blue specs that come off during this process really start to add up and make a mess, so either do this outside or somewhere you can easily sweep (garage, porch, etc.) and 2) you need to wear gloves, because it will start to tear the skin on your hands to pieces.

So after getting it all ready, I hit them with a quick brown spray paint, then used some spray adhesive to apply the flock.

Clumpy fluffs of foliage sprayed brown

After adding the first bits of flocking (it will get more later once assembled into a tree proper)

Needing to let these bits dry but not wanting to waste the good weather, I decided to go ahead and test putting together and flocking the fluff on one of the smaller armature trees.

Bit of spray adhesive to the armature and then just sticking the small leftover chunks of fluff from the bigger trees

All flocked up! 

All that's left for the mock up is to paint the trunks, and I have to say, I'm quite excited about how it turned out! I'm not as excited to do this 11 more times... but still, excited.

Hopefully Part 3 will finish this series out, with a final picture of all the trees together! Maybe if this decent weather will hold through this upcoming weekend...