Ork Big Mek: Phase 1

Threw together a Big Mek with a kustom force field recently.  He's pretty much just made with random stuff I had lying around.  I'm rather pleased with the overall effect.  He's a lot more interesting looking than my last one.  A painted version should be coming along shortly.

This particular model is for a story campaign a friend and I are planning.  Should be a lot of fun.  I'm really looking forward to playing some stranger games.  Things I don't get to do in my usual run of only attending tourneys.  Uneven point values, weird force org charts, lopsided deployments and bizarre objectives.  I'm excited.

2500 point Ork List mark 2

After a bit of thought I've gone ahead and made some changes to my initial Ork list.  The original list can be found here.  The original list didn't really have any good ways to deal with storm shield armed terminators, and since those are a staple of tourney lists, at least in my area, I decided I needed to address the issue.

First the list:

Ghazghkull Conversion

A friend of mine gave me a Ghazghkull model for Christmas that I finally got around to assembling.  I've never been a big fan of the pose of the model or the details coming off the top, so I made some adjustments along the way.

The head was replaced with the one from the Assault on Black Reach warboss.  Reposing the power klaw arm was a little difficult since the sockets for everything are done as squares so things only fit together one way.  I cut away the cable that connects to the main body and filed everything smooth., cut off the peg, and pinned it in place in a different position.  The bosspole is from the plastic nob box and the flames are from a couple of spare Sister of Battle Cannoness backpacks I had lying around.  The flames and the bosspole can be removed so they can be used as wound counters.

I'm hoping to get him painted before classes start again on Monday.

Ork Lootas

Finished the first of my lootas finally.  They're taking quite a bit longer than most of the rest of the force due to the sheer number of details.  Once I finished with the base colors I painted them one at a time to make sure I didn't miss anything.  Here's the first three just before I flocked them.  They're a bit shiny at the moment, but the matte sealant should tone the metals down just a little.

 

2500 point Ork thoughts

I've been working on my orks again and rather enjoying it.  I'm looking forward to getting the force prepared for some larger events.  Hopefully I'll have a 2500 point army ready in time for 'ard boyz this year.  My orks are probably a less competitive force than my guard, but they are a lot more fun to play.

Plans for the Near Future

I've got a couple major projects I'm working on for the next couple months.  The first of which is expanding my Daemon army to 2000 points for a tournament later this month.  I'm currently planning to add wings to my 3 daemon princes and another group of 5 plaguebearers.  The plaguebearers are an easy addition once I find someone who has them in stock.  The wings are going to be a bit more challenging, but I'm hopeful I'll be able to get them finished in time.  I have even found the perfect wings for the project.

Kill Team battle report

A local store was running a kill team tournament that I decided to attend recently.  I like kill team.  The fast paced games can be a lot of fun, and the skirmish scale makes for totally different strategies than normal games of 40k.  The store was using the standard rules out of the Battle Missions book, but disallowed the use of vehicles and added a 45 minute time limit.  They also added an additional goal to the mission, to get a massacre you needed to have one model in you opponents deployment zone when the game ended.  The previous Kill Team tournament that I saw was extremely lopsided in favor of Dreadnoughts and the like, and they wanted to avoid that.  I chose to run my orks, mainly because I have the force I want completely painted.  Ork's low leadership is a bit of a disadvantage in Kill team, they leave pretty much as soon as they start taking break tests.

Ork Wierdboy

I picked up the Ork wierdboy model back when GW released it in January of 2008 purely based on the look of it.  I loved the thought of grots trying to hold back the rampaging Ork Psyker as warp energy courses through his body.  It's a shame his rules are so weak.  The total absence of consistency makes him virtually unfieldable in a competitive environment.  Some of his powers are quite useful but even with the re-roll you can never reliably get the power you need when you need it.  I'd consider him to be a lot more useful if one of his ability let him use the power of his choice.  As it stands he's mostly just a bench-warmer that sits in my display cabinet and get ogled by the kids whenever they are in my office.  I am pretty pleased with how he turned out however.

The largest modification I made to the model was to chop off the grot swinging off his right side.  While I appreciated the thought of one of his keepers failing to hold him back and getting swung about by the enraged psyker, I felt the execution was rather lacking.  The grot looked rather silly and the position of the chain looked extremely artificial.  And so, it had to go.  My original intent when I bought this model was to add some lightning shooting out of his right eye, but after drilling out the eye socket and screwing around with various wires trying to make something that didn't look retarded, I gave up.  Hence the gaping hole where an eye should be.  I plan to eventually replace the socket with a glass bead painted bright green, but that's a project for down the road.

I painted him primarily for use in a 500 point casual list I put together when I first started on my orks.  Over several games he performed with adequate mediocrity.  He killed a few things, but never really managed to do anything all that impressive.  It was a lot of fun to set off his random powers though.  I figure I'll continue to field him in casual games just for the joy of teleporting around the board and occasionally blasting stuff with auto hitting weapons.

The Orks take a Field Trip

I brought my Orks to their first tournament this past Saturday.  It was a 1500 point event.  I chose not to take any pictures because with my limited experience with the army and its large numbers of infantry I was worried about having enough time to complete games.  In the future I think I'm going to try to take photos in the interest of learning from my mistakes.  I ended up finishing fairly poorly, but had a rather good time.  It was, if nothing else, an excellent learning experience.

Shoota Boyz

I've been spending a lot of time painting Orks for the last two months and I've made some good progress I think.  My currently completed force consists of:

Big Mek with kustom force field
Wierdboy
30 shoota boyz
19 slugga boyz
3 killa kans with rocket launchas
11 grots with runtheard

And I have nearly completed a further 11 shoota boyz, 8 lootas, and 3 more killa kans.  Overall good progress and I'm very pleased with how they are turning out.

 

I've chosen to go with an olive skin tone and lots of rust effects to tie the army together as a cohesive whole.  My photography skills still need some work, but I'm getting better at it.  Future posts will discuss the logic behind my color selections and discussions of the techniques I've used to get the army painted quickly.  I've finally gotten a small photo booth set up in my home office so I can get pictures of units as I complete them.

I'm currently working on an old Warhound Titan for a friend of mine.  It's the old armourcast version.  I'm trying to make it look as good as I can, but it's a rather cartoony looking model and looks rather dated.  I'll throw up some pictures as I get it a bit closer to completed.