Varag Ghoul-Chewer

I think I promised that this month was going to be all about Orks with a “K” but needless to say an Orc has rudely barged in anyway. The infamous Blood Bowl star player Varag Ghoul-Chewer has been on the edge of my painting desk since last Orctober and I finally faced the fact that he’s not going to paint himself – impressive though that might be – so I’d better get on with it myself. Anyway, he’s done now – rival sportsmen beware!

Incidently, those of you who’re viewing this through the WordPress reader may find that some of the pictures are strangely outsized and distorted. I presume this is yet another case of WordPress deciding to make work for themselves and irritate their users by finding something that ain’t broke and attempting to fix it anyway, bless ‘em. If the problem doesn’t resolve itself soon I’ll look into seeing if there’s anything I can do at my end – in the meantime the website doesn’t appear to be affected so if it bothers you (and it should!) please go to convertordie.wordpress.com and look at the posts there.

Anyway, time to get back to the 41st Millennium!

Kruel and Unusual – Part 4

Time to start some warm-up exercises ahead of Orktober, and my now annual Ork War vs fellow blogger The Imperial Rebel Ork (who’s already been hard at work assembling his own Ork invasion which you can see here). As all great athletes will tell you it pays to train so over the last few weeks I’ve been hammering scrap metal to my body as makeshift armour, yelling “Waaagh!” at passing strangers and mounting a spiked deff-rolla on the family car. This week I even found time to paint a few of the green lads. You won’t catch me retiring on day one having exacerbated an old ork-painting injury, oh no!

This year I’m planning to focus on my 40k Ork army but I do have plenty of fantasy Orcs kicking around as well, including various Kruelboyz, so I grabbed three of them out of the pile for a quick warm up.

I really like how this one’s shield matches his own face down to the eye-patch.

Ugly gits aren’t they!

Plenty more green lads are just a couple of weeks away but, assuming life can find it in itself to be a tiny bit less manic for a few days, I’ve got a bunch of other models I’d like to knock through first. Watch this space!

Dat Der Dokk Iz Bak!

Cast your mind back to the heady days of June 2020 and you may recall that I painted a Bonesplitterz Wardokk (or a Savage Orc shaman if you speak English). If you need a reminder he looked a little bit like this…

Secretly I was never entirely happy with him. His skin, painted exactly the same way as all my other Orcs and Orks, looked too dark and drab. Perhaps it was the way it contrasted against all the bones he’s wearing but it didn’t look right to me (although I’m perfectly happy with how it looks on all my other greenskins). Plus he needed some tattoos and warpaint to really look the part of a crazed barbarian shaman. In fact it was this dissatisfaction that lead me to try a different shade of skin for my Savage Orcs when I put together a warband of them last Orctober. Here’s an example of the new style. 

Since then I’ve been meaning to go back to the old Wardokk and repaint his skin to bring him into line with the rest of the crew, and now I’ve finally got around to it. 

And here he is hanging out with a couple of his new buddies as he finally finds his place in the tribe.

Needless to say I’m much happier with him now and he can take his place at last alongside the rest of the ladz. 

Blood Bowl Troll

I’ve been promising to paint up a troll for my Blood Bowl teams for years now and it’s well past time I just got the hell on with it so here he is at last. 

He wasn’t the easiest model to paint but actually he wasn’t that difficult either, I think I managed to convince myself that he was going to be very challenging and in the end he wasn’t too bad. I might even talk myself into painting another one soon. In the meantime though he’s done and so, for now, are both my Orc teams (he’ll be playing for both the Orcs and the Black Orcs for the foreseeable). 

The Mean Green Geezerettes – Part 2

Right, let’s get this Fembruary party started with another Orc cheerleader for my Blood Bowl team. She joins her sister that I painted back in Orctober.

Go team! Go team! 

As with last year I’ve got loads of models from the backlog and I’m going to try to batter through as many of them as possible. Last year I managed 21. This year I suspect it will be rather less, the first couple of weeks of the month look set to be pretty busy, but we’ll see how it goes.

Back To The Primitive – Part 5

I meant to paint this guy back in Orctober alongside the rest of my savage orc warband, but somehow I never managed to get him finished. Then I decided to paint some more lads at the same time as him, but right now I haven’t even got around to assembling them. Then I thought “stuff it, let’s just get him painted”. 

Of course now I’ve actually finished him I’m feeling the bug of orcy enthusiasm again so I might just dig out some unbuilt models and start sticking the rest of the clan together at last.

The Git-Killaz – Part 5

Right you horrible lot! Did you over-indulge at Christmas? Good!

As it happens I’ve been a busy boy. With the end of the year looming I decided to finish off my Black Orc Blood Bowl team (minus the troll – for crying out loud will you stop going on and on about that bloody troll!). The team had reached the stage where although there were still several models to paint they were all fairy small, nothing I couldn’t handle before we reach 2022 right?

First things first we have the three remaining goblins that complete the squad of players able to take to the pitch. Let’s take a look at them.

This one seems to think he’s a bit tough. Let’s see how well that holds up when a chaos warrior is thundering down towards him…

I do like this lad’s headgear, very stylish indeed sir!

Gathered together with their mates from a couple of weeks ago, we have the goblin half of the team (joining the Orc half which I painted – appropriately – back in Orctober).

Of course we need a full-team group shot but that will have to wait because we have a few other things to look at first. Each team comes with a couple of coin-shaped counters with the team logo stamped on them.

And then we have a couple of balls. Again each team comes with balls in the style of the team. Do you want to see a goblin playing with his balls? You do? Well ok then…

A clever thing about a lot of the recent Blood Bowl teams is the way that each miniature can be built in one of two very distinct ways. Two sprues of models therefore give you two sets of pairs of models. In the first Orc team I painted you ended up with two sets of “clones”, each Orc was the same as their partner, until I set about converting with gusto of course! With this team there was no need to do that, and in my book that’s a very good thing. Much as I enjoy converting models it should be something that you do because you want to do it, not because you feel you have to just to end up with an aesthetically pleasing collection. Anyway, just for interest here’s all the pairs of models from the Black Orc team. Despite the name of this blog I can’t recall doing anything in the way of converting with these.

And there we have it, the Black Orc team is ready to roll. Want to see a group shot? Of course you do!

I’ve still got plenty more Blood Bowl to tackle in 2022 of course. There’s that half-painted elf team, my long-neglected humans and various undead monsters all clamouring for attention. And that troll of course but the less said about him the better!

The Git-Killaz – Part 4

Time to revisit the Blood Bowl pitch as I keep chipping away at the Black Orc team I started in October. Last time we saw them I’d painted all 6 of the orcs which just left the goblins waiting for attention. Since then I’ve been working away at painting up the more nimble and diminutive side of the team and managed to complete first one…

…then another…

…and finally a third. 

I also went for the easy win of getting these two markers painted up as well. 

All in all the team is coming together nicely now so I’ll aim to finish it by that ever elusive date known only as “soon”. 

Orktober 2021 – Da Big Round Up

So having announced just yesterday that I’m embarking on another painting challenge I thought it was high time I padded my post count took a look back at the last one. Last month was Orktober (sometimes spelled Orctober – but never, ever spelled October because that’s for wimps!). I had a plan for the month; to paint as many of my unpainted greenskins as I possibly could. Then I discovered that my fellow warboss and blogger, the legendary IRO had the same plan and from this a contest was born (more on that below).

Now as the dust settles I find myself looking at 37 newly painted Orks. Want to see what they look like as a group? Of course you do! (As usual don’t do your eyes a mischief by peering at the pictures, click on them for a proper look).

Quite the mob isn’t it, but with so many green bodies crammed together it’s hard to make out what’s going on so let’s take a closer look at some individual groups. My Ork army for Warhammer 40k is my longest-standing collection (that I still have anyway). It was the Orks that first got me into Warhammer 40k back in 4th Edition when I stepped from being a casual observer of the 41st Millennium to being a full-blown addict. Back then the Ork warlord Ghazghkull and the Second and Third Wars for Armageddon were intrinsic to 40k (nobody talks about the First War for Armageddon on pain of being taken away by the Inquisition…). The struggle to control that planet remains one of my favourite 40k storylines and so it was a real pleasure to add Ghazghkull to my collection at last, alongside a whole bunch of other boyz.

It wasn’t all about the grim darkness of the far future however, I worked on a warband of Savage Orcs (or Bonesplitter Orruks if you prefer) to run riot in games of Warcry.

I also added a couple of models to my Kruelboy collection, enough to turn them into a Warcry warband as well. These two very different greenskin philosophies will have to determine which is best soon in the only way they know how – by battering each other silly on the tabletop.

I already have a small collection of Ironjaw Orcs, the bigger, more heavily armoured breed of Orc living in the Mortal Realms (although even a paper bag is more heavily armoured than the Bonesplitters, many of whom forget to even wear clothes). Three more joined the ranks this month, including a pair of Brutes and a hulking Warchanter.

Long before Orcs started looting tanks in the 41st Millennium or sneaking around in the swamps of the Mortal Realms they were indulging in a spot of hobbit-bothering and ransacking the civilisations of Middle Earth in Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. As I’ve commented many times the LotR miniatures range (or the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game as it’s known currently) never really hooked me in, but I do have a few Orcs to paint from that range too and this seemed like a fine moment to be working on them.

 Sport has been described as war by other means as nations prove their superiority over one another through teams of athletes rather than armies of soldiers. Of course, if you’re a Black Orc playing Blood Bowl there probably isn’t much difference. This month I motivated myself to get the Orc half of the team painted, and I’ll aim to work on the goblins that accompany them soon.

Of course a team needs a few cheerleaders to keep the fans on side, and no-one in the crowd is going to dare to misbehave with this lady keeping an eye on them!

It wasn’t just about greenskins either, I even managed to sneak in a few other models of a distinctly un-orky persuasion.

And there we have it – 37 greenskins, and 4 other miniatures, not bad for a month’s effort. Of course I didn’t do this alone. A good adversary is vital to an Ork, giving them someone against whom they can test themselves. The more an Ork fights the bigger, tougher and meaner he becomes. Faced with a good enough enemy an Ork who might otherwise have been just a weedy little yoof can grow into a warboss whose tread shakes the galaxy itself. The Commissar Yarrick to my Ghazghkull Thraka was that mightiest of warbosses, the mean, green antipodean, the Imperial Rebel Ork himself. We set out at the start of the month to see which of us could paint the most Orks in a single month and against all odds battled each other to a draw. Really there’s only one thing to do in a situation like that and that’s come back for another go next year!

Kruel and Unusual – Part 3

This Orctober one of my key goals was to paint up a Warcry warband of Savage Orcs (or Bonesplitter Orruks depending on how well you speak AoS). I’m pleased to say this is now complete, with the crazed, stamping Wurrgog Prophet added to the group earlier in the week. This also gives me four different warbands to choose from for Destruction themed Warcry games; Bonesplitters, Ironjaws, Gloomspite Gits and Ogres. However there is one more Destruction faction available for greenskin fans to use in Warcry, the new Kruelboyz. These were given rules as a free download through the Warhammer Community website (and if you’re interested you can find them here). With the Savage Orcs complete I turned my attention to the Kruelboyz. Could I paint another Warcry warband with only a few days of Orctober left to go?

No, of course I couldn’t! However I didn’t need to – by chipping away my new collection of Kruelboyz harvested from the Dominion boxset over the past couple of months I already had almost everything I needed to get started. A couple more greenskins would be sufficient to round out the warband and that was a much more achievable goal.

First things first I decided to add another Gutrippa to the group. I think my preference would be to include one of these boys armed with a close combat weapon (a hakka) rather than another spear (a stikka) just for a bit of variety. As it happens I have managed to nab myself some hakkas amongst various other useful bits, so I’m planning to convert some of my boys with stikkas from the Dominion box into boys with hakkas. For now however I don’t have time for those kind of shenanigans – plus I already had a boy with a spear sitting on the desk – so I just concentrated on getting him painted.

Here he is next to his two new mates.

Next I turned my attention to giving the tribe some ranged power. Unlike some other greenskin tribes the Kruelboyz aren’t averse to standing well back and shooting their adversaries full of arrows, and the ” Man-Skewer Boltboys” do pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.

Then it was just a case of adding the Hobgrots, the Killaboss and the sneaky little Stabgrot that I painted earlier in the year and the warband is good to go.

I do have a few other Kruelboys still kicking around and I had rather ambitiously hoped to get them painted this month as well, but alas it was not to be. Still I’m proud to say that’s another warband finished – and my total number of Orcs painted this month now stands at 33.