start of my bad moon army

[synapse]

UPDATE:

current work (page 49):


PAGE ONE: painting guide
page 2: new colour scheme and koptas
page 3: battlewagon
page 19: FLASHGITS started
PAGE 24: army pic so far, 50 normal boyz finished
PAGE 30: warboss done
EDIT: a taster of whats to come on pages 6+


ok, ive decided to post the colours, techniques i used for the army here as a few people have asked me for guidelines (ive started with the metallic and the yellow, but will post a guide for the skin when i get round to it later on)

no problem!

SKINTONE
the skin was painted first, and with orks especially, i consider it to be the most important part of the model (in the case of these orks, the areas ive spent the most time on are the skin, metal and yellow) so spent a bit longer on it than the other areas (though some of my photos of them show that i didnt spend that long on them... ). here's a quick run-though on the process:

• first i applied a clean flat layer of knarlock green, watering down the colour a bit and applyiong it in 2 layers. try to be neat at this stage as it will save a lot of fiddlyness later where you will have to go over the green mistakes with black. less speed, more haste as my mum says!
• next, a heavy layer of devlan mud was applied. you might need to speed up the drying with a hairdryer or a lamp as otherwise it may dry in pools, if you use as much as i do!
• once thats dry (and make sure its dry, as youll mess it up otherwise!) paint knarlock green on the raised areas, leaving the wash in the recess. water down the paint so it dries a bit opaque, thus making it blend in better with the previous layer.
• a few layers were painted on top of this by adding bleached bone to the mix.
• this was topped wit hanother, thinner, layer of devlan mud.
• the faces, knuckles and veins on the muscles were retouched with the knarlock green/bleached bone mix.

METALS
the metals (on the koptas, battlewagon and larger models like the meganobz, is basically applied as follows:

• black undercoat (i spray, a bit thicker than usual to get some more texture. if you have that special textured spray GW made, it would be great
• drybrush tin bitz. i prefer a few lighter coats than one heavy one as the heavy one covers detail more
• drybrush a boltgun metal/tinbitz coat (1 part BGM to 6 parts TB as the emtal tends to 'overpower' the tin bitz with only the smallest amount of paint).
• heavy wash with devlan mud
• selective washes with other browns, black, greens, even yellow if youre careful enough. apply these extra washes to selective armour plates to make them look different
• drybrush the plates you want to be 'steel' wit hboltgun metal, very lightly, so the weash shows through.
• do the same with tin bitz, dwarf bronze and brazen brass (these work best on the plates with green washes applied to them) to get different coloured plates
• apply more washes as you see fit

on the standard boys the process was quicker:

• quickly drybrush/overbrush all metal areas tin bitz
• go over it with a pretty light drybrush of boltgun metal
• wash devlan mud
• drybrush with a layer of 1:6 boltgubn metal:tin bitz

as youve probably seen, i dont highlight the metal, which helps with the corroded look ( ifond that highlighting this dark usted metal might work on areas that see a lot of action, where rust would rub clean, exposing the metal beneath (I inner rod of pistons/hydraulics in flat chainmail with a wash with the old brown ink to get the greased/clean look).


YELLOW
and the yellow is applied on top of those finished plates (so basically, the battlewagon and meganobz i had done were completely painted in metallics before i applied the yellows. the yellow was painted like this:

• paint the areas to be yellow black first (im beginning to doubt the necessity of this step, though old habits die hard!
• stipple tausept oche very thickly onto the black areas, being careful to leave the slightest of slivers of black showing through the edges. the thinner the black line the better.
• the imprtant step (if you want the yellow to look really thick and bumpy) is to go back for a second coat before the first coat is completely dry. this lifts up the areas of the original layer that have not dried yet, creating funky cratered shapes that i love. if you miss out the black stage you can use this method to lift away the bottom layer of yellow to reveal the rusted metal.
• if you want you acn add a second step of yellow, stippling/drybrushing iyanden darksun over the ochre.
• when its all done and dry apply a thin random washes with badab black and devlan mud

hope that helps!











this has been on the cards for many many years

ive painted more than my fair share of orks over the years, many or 40k, most for fantasy, though sadly none were ever my own. i love orks and have the rogue trader background book WAAAGH DA ORKS!! (from which all the background in the new ork codex was looted) and have loved bad moons ever since. i think Paul BOnner's arwork is incredible and really captures so much character and flavour.

and so it comes that ive decided to take the plunge and start a bad moon army. though no normal army. i intend to paint these guys to the best of my abilities and do likewise with conversions and so on. so dont expect a huge army to grow out of these guys quickly!


heres the first 5 of 12 orks ive got my hands on. as you can see theyve got the smurf hats which is a theme i wasnt to carry acros the whole army, as bad moons are renowned for these hats. pretty basic start, though i wanted to get into the rhythim of things before i get into really heavy converting. im trying to find ways to alter the hat heads, since theres only one variety, id end up with 100 of the same head in the armywhich i dont want. as you can see of the 5 guys in that unit, 4 of them have the hats, and thats the ratio im looking for 4:5 or 7:10. of the 4 with hats on, one has had a different head glued on with GS ear warmers handing down the sides (or whatever those hangy bits are on the bottom of the smurf hats ),

i dont intend on gaming with the models and really want to try my best to paint each model to the height of my abilities, though i will probably put them up for sale once im done, unless i fall so in love with them i cant part with them... we'll see!

[Death Korp]

They look nice on them bases, what bases are they?

DK

[memnark51]

they look like war machine bases

[synapse]

thats right.

[synapse]

no pics yet, but i started the skin tone on the orks.

im trying something out on these guys ive been wanting to do for ages now, and prove to the world that im not crazy in wanting to paint orks with BLUE SKIN

thats right... blue skin. think along the lines of a bruised green/blue/brown colour and you wont be too far off the mark.

dont trust me? too bad! youll have to wait for pics!!

i basecoated the models in (A green/brown colour) and (A grey/blue colour)

ill be highlighting with camo green bleached bone, and finishing off with lots of blue/brown/flesh/purple glaxes to get lots of interesting colours in there

lets hope this works out!

also, heres a pic of my WIP 'truescale' nob:



i wasnt happy with the normal ork legs for the nob body provided in the bos and decided to make a normal pair of legs a bit bigger

[memnark51]

i would bulk his legs up with Gs.. just an opinion tho. they look very good cant wait to see some painting.

[synapse]

well as you can see from the spacers, theres stil lwork to be done, and i will bulk them out, though not very much - ive always thought ork legs dont grow much (well obviously i think they grow a bit, otherwise i wouldnt have made them bigger, but you get what i mean)

[sartarius]

this looks interesting synapse
im not a big fan of orks tbh.... but this seems cool
subscribed

[Tonberry King]

Oh man, your Bad Moon army will turn out fantastic! I've seen your other stuff so I can't wait to see you do your magic with the awesome Orks. Building a Bad Moon army myself ^^

[wreiro]

Blue skin sounds interesting will be following your progress closely.

H

[synapse]

got the first 5 boys basecoated ready for a frenetic weekend of painting fun i may need to rethink my original idea a bit sicne the tone i was hoping to do doesnt seem to lend itself well to the yellow contrasts ive got planned.

its a learning experience...

[Tonberry King]

That's too bad. Sounded like a cool idea mate. Looking forward to those pics!

[synapse]

ah well, ill stick to the same colours but will ve to glaze the yellow in different colours to get an overall similar tone.

[Tonberry King]

Cool, this is really exciting!

[BlazeXI]

Sounds interesting. Can't wait for the pics.

[Solun Decius]

This is interresting stuff! *subscribed*

Green stuffing a hat like that probably wouldn't be the most complicated modeling job. Other than that, I guess carving the face from inside the hat and fitting a different head inside would be the way to go. Or go 50/50 like you already did. Fitting the top part of the hat but remodeling the earflaps.

Any of those methods though .... doing 70 or 80 of them ...

Looking forward to those blue orks!

[synapse]

ok so here i am, 5 hours into the painting process and ive finished the skin. pics cam out a bit desaturated. i tried adding a bit more colour to them in PS but they ended up looking different to the real thing anyway so i left them as is. i suspect it may be down to the amount of black on the model, confusing my camera's small brain (that, and my limited pic-taking skills)

anywho, here are some pics of the finished skin (i may add a few more green and purple glazes, since the ones i used were a bit too subtle)

group shot


random pics

[synapse]

while i was readying the models for their photoshoot i dropped one in the pot of my snooker table.
panice ensued, though after a few minutes i was able to compose myself and devised this:


a makeshift hook/retreival mechanism to get the ork back. he was returned to my grasp safely, if a bit dazed.

[swagger]

Like the little anecdote

Must reserve judgement on them green(blue?)skins though. As you said, the colours seem desaturated. Looks like that camera is overwhelmed

[Mr Feral]

I like the skin tone a lot, it's different from the standard and it's well blended too. I think more hints of green might help, but it's looking great so far!