Ork Weirdboy: Wuzzbad

The release of 8th edition 40k and the parallel release of the Ork army list has prompted me to dust off my beloved Ork models and begin playing again. So far, I have had one small 500pt game and came away feeling positive about the game and the Ork army list. One issue is that Orks seem to play more like they used to back in 5th edition, which means re-painting and updating lots of units that I haven't used in years!

Here's one of my first completed 're-paint' jobs, an Ork Weirdboy. I originally painted this character years and years ago to lead a 500pt force in a tournament hosted in Bristol. It was the ONLY time I used him! Now, with the new release, the weirdboy potentially has a place again within an Ork force. I shall be using him to boot the boys to +1 attack or teleporting a 30 strong unit of shoota boyz around the board! We'll see how my enemies like that neat trick!

Anyway, since the original model was painted rather nicely in the first place, I initially thought it would just be a re-painting of the skin. Sadly, the more I painted, the more I found wrong with the original job. In the end, virtually the entire model was re-painted. I'm really pleased with the end result though. It was a beautifully detailed model to paint with bags of character.

I brightened the skin to fit more in line with my most recently painted Orks. I also extensively lined the skin to make him appear old and wrinkled. Wuzzbad isn't necessarily old, but I imagine having to deal with all that Waaaaaghhhhh energy really takes into toll on the skin! I also added more red spot colour details and check patterns to the bells to tie him in with the rest of the army. I tried to make his eyes seem as though they're burning with pent up electrical energy! I also toyed with the idea of making his skin glow blue too but dismissed it for fear of ruining all my hard work! Maybe i'll test the idea on another model first.

Overall, I'm very happy with the finished result. I can't wait to test him out on the battlefield.  

Big Mek Sprokit and some shooty Shoota Boyz

Hello dear readers and good evening. I felt too much time had passed since my last offering on this blog. I now find myself in the curious position of teaching 3 year-olds, which comes with its many challenges and rewards. Unfortunately, one common challenge is finding any time to indulge in my favourite hobby of painting and gaming. Fortunately, however, I have found a local club and have sourced myself a generous ride so hopefully I shall be back in the gaming saddle after an all too long absence.

Having said that, I have found at least a little time since my last post to paint some Shoota Boyz and an old Big Mek.

First up is Big Mek Sprokit, a metal model equipped with a kustom force-field. I have always loved this model and in battle it is a very useful unit. I used to use him up front in a battle wagon, providing killa kans and trucks with the save. However, under the new rules (yuck!), I'll be fielding him at the back with my five grot kannonz. Regardless, he's a brilliant model and I'm very pleased with the re-paint job.

I replaced the original base with a fresh new one since the original was covered in very course ballast and badly placed wreckage. I then updated all the colours to match my most current Ork models, lightening the skin tone and adding more Goff checks. Finally, I brightened up the generally drab Goff scheme with brass patina and rust weathering powder. I really think these little flashes of colour make my Goff Orks pop.

Let me know what you think of him in the comments below. I'm always trying to improve my techniques.

Next up is the beginnings of another 30 strong Shoota Boyz mob. I picked up an old boz of plastic/metal hybrid Stikk Bommaz from the bring-and-buy sale at the Birmingham Games Expo this year for £6!! This prompted me to get building another mob and to use some of the Armorcast muzzle flash effects I bought years ago! I really, really like the effect and I'll be distributing flashes amongst my other finished mobs at a roughly 50/50 proportion. I'll take time, but it's worth it I think. Otherwise, I painted these boyz in exactly the same way as before. Five down, 25 more to go!

Painboy...Pain in the arse more like!

Well, well, well. After a few years of dedicating all my painting and modelling time to historical miniatures, I finally plucked up the interest to dig out a few unfinished Ork models. First out of the box was this painboy model, which was the only figure I really liked from the Ork codex release. I love the giant metal hand and cheeky grin on this model and it also stands in rather nicely as a replacement for the Mad Dok!

However, 3 weeks later the bloody thing is finally finished! I appreciate that my painting skills and techniques have developed over the past 2 years and that my time has been extremely limited recently but still, 3 weeks on a single model! The detail on him is astonishing, which meant that every time I dipped my paintbrush I'd find something new that I'd missed. Pile on top of that the number of tubes, vials and other glass/fluid features and you've got a complicated, time consuming paint job!


Regardless, I'm thrilled with the results and I'm only sorry my photography skills are inadequate to showcase the paint job. Maybe there'll be a little more 40k on the way! We'll have to see.

P.S. I'm not playing the stupid game, just to be clear!

Waaagh Grull Grokk

Ahh now uz wont to 'ear about Grull Grokk ehh? Well wun fing you shud know 'bout Grull Grokk iz he az a dead gud sense of ooma for a Goff. Best fing iz hiz jokes are dead funnee evun wen dey izn't. Der wuz dis wun time wen Grimbash got a nu trukk un Grull Grokk fort it wud be a rite larf to rig it up wiz a load ov tank minez.....hurhh hurhh hurhhhhh. You shud av seen iz face wen he turned da key!

Alwayz rememba dat lad, Grull Grokkz jokez iz alwayz funny. So don't forget to laff!

Boss Nob Skargrob lecturing the new recruits to Waaagh! Grull Grokk

Ok so after a disappointing start to the Orks (God that codex was a waste of money!) I have at least been reminded of how much I love to paint! Which is excellent considering the amount of Orks I have left to paint! Anyway, kicking off the Waaagh is Boss Grull Grokk himself.

Warboss Grull Grokk is a notorious copier and there's no one more copy worthy in the whole universe than Ghazghkull Thraka. Grull Grokk will do anything to copy his hero, he even went as far as to commission a suit of 'replica' mega armour so he can look like the prophet of the waaagh himself! By far his most prized possession, however, is his boss pole, which was genuinely worn by Ghazghkull himself! At least that's what the grinning Badmoon boss said right before he did the burney dance. Unfortunately, he can never truly look like Ghazghkull due to the arm he lost, but Grull Grokk likes to remind everyone that his custom spear is even shinier than anything Ghazghkull has. Well....it is his favourite joke after all! 

I built Grull Grokk out of the left over parts of the absolutely epic Ghazghkull model, which I had lying around. His power klaw had been used on my Biker Boss so that was replaced with a spare killa kan pneumatic spear. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that a warboss can now take a combi-flamer with mega armour so I converted one up fairly simply. Finally, I finished him off with a nice tall rocky outcrop to menace over. I'm pretty happy with him, lets see how his Waaagh pans out on the table! 

The Wartrakk-tor!!

I woke up this Sunday with a hankering for kit bashing and this is the result! Huzzar, the wartrakk-tor complete with an extra skorchy skorcha! Perfect for clearing away those fields and of course pest control.

I bashed it together from a load of spare Trukk parts I had left over from my nob bikers and some tracks from old robogear models. There a few bits from other kits like the dakka jet but they're mainly for detail. I've almost got enough parts to make two more, but I'm running low on exhausts and engines. Perhaps I can scratch something up!

Sum git once told me yu cudnt solve evry problem wiv fire.....hu hu hu, I pruved im rong!

It's been a while since I posted anything here so I thought I'd show you all one of my new favourite units, burner boyz. I'm not sure why I've not used them before? They're pretty cheap at a mere 15pts a model and come armed with a burner, which is either a flamer or a power weapon (AP 3). I guess a major downside to them is the fact that they cannot take a dedicated transport vehicle, which meant that they couldn't keep up with the rest of my units in past army builds.

However, as the game changes so to does my approach to building lists. Now I have a much more foot slogging based army replete with large mobs of shoota boyz, lootas and an aegis defense line. Suddenly, my battle wagons look a bit empty, but wait there's space for burner boyz! And so starts my new enthusiasm for the little guys.

Recently, I've been running them up to expensive or large units and just flamming them, either on foot or from the open topped hatch of a battle wagon. When placed carefully, I'm regularly rewarded with 50+ hits!!! That's a lot of armour saves to pass, even if you are a terminator! Then, when they're inevitably assaulted, they can fall back on power weapons for that extra nasty surprise your opponent wasn't expecting! Seriously, for 150pts, they're a steal.

Here's a few quick shots of the buggers. 3 are still being painted, they'll be finished soon :p

Share the pain

Despite having an extremely busy week, I have managed to get some work done on the nob bikers unit and I began assembling my grot separatists! If that wasn't enough I also got my first game in with this list and romped home to a crushing victory over the spikey boyz! It's a good start but I did make a few mistakes and my strategy worked more as the result of luck than anything else...practice practice practice!

Nob Biker Painboy

As you can see, he's not quite finished yet. There are a few extra micro-details I want to add to his bike and he needs a head. I'll sit down later tonight and sculpt a medical face mask for him, which should be good enough to truly mark him out as the painboy. 

Ork Lootaz- Re-visiting the Project

I'm sure many of you have been peering back at the blog from time to time wondering 'what ever happened to those lootaz you were working on?' At the time I was getting some fantastic feedback from everybody, which really kept me going with the project but then I moved and they became lost amongst all the other things I've been doing.

Well 2 weeks ago I played a game of 40k using my ork army and did astonishingly well considering my opponent. I also fielded my lootaz in this battle, which had many people attending club that day giving me praise on how cool they looked. Kind words combined with game success has inspired me to get cracking on finishing the unit properly and that means putting the painting hat back on!

So, as I promised Pom, I spent all of Sunday relaxing with DS-9, paint and Toad in the Hole! However, it wasn't battle wagons I was working on (sorry to mislead you Pom). Instead, I got the first of 12 lootaz finished, based and weathered. I do hope you enjoy, oh and keep dropping in, I intend to finished this project fully.

Don't worry you're safe so long as he's aiming at you personally!

What do you say to an ork loota?

Anything you like, most of the time he can't hear you!

This guy has a gas powered assault cannon thing. The ammo is contained in the drum on the front.

I love this one, the grot on his back is removing bullets from the feed and dropping them into the ammo loader!

I can't stand the look of the shoulder mounted deff guns, which is a shame because the unit is such a nice thing to field in an army. Instead I always wanted them to be hulking about massive miniguns of some sort, which is why I bought the maxmini miniguns they recently added to their web store. Unfortunately they are only as large as an ork boyz shoota and are more in keeping with a human wielder. I bought a box of lootas anyway and began hacking up the bits and repositioning them to suit my initial idea. I am really pleased with the way the first two have come out. It just takes some patience, limb repositioning and greenstuff but I guess that's all part of the fun! Just another eight to go.

Also here is my finished dread. He doesn't have a name yet.