State of Waaaagh

It has been months since I posted to this blog. I realize that is kind of normal for some and abhorrent to others but it is what it is. I got into Warmachine/Hordes over the summer and sort of focused what little painting energy I had on that.
I recently played a 2k battle of 40k with my Orks vs some Nids. I lost. This is not the worst part. It was a really close game...a few dice rolls one way or the other and it might have come out a win. But I was bored. I was bored at moving my dozens of boyz, bored shooting, bored fighting, bored looking up obscure and convoluted rules for a game that used to represent a couple of generals mastering forces across a battlefield and having a tactical and challenging game. Now, I see min maxing, I see unstoppable monsters and special characters. I see space marine armies wiht hardly any marines in it and I just think....I would rather be playing war machine, or watching TV, or just about anything other than playing this broken boring souless version of a game I used to love.
Maybe it is not the game, maybe I have just descended into beardiness, maybe I am just bitter about my favorite army. Honestly though I just think there are better games than 40k. I look forward to playing some fantasy battles and maybe 6th edition and a new codex will redeem the hobby for me. For now though I am setting aside my boyz and focusing on the beasts of the Circle of Orboros and the zealots of the Protectorate of Menoth.
Thanks for reading and I truly hope to return to regularly posting on this site.
Rob 'Grokka' Ferrick

Summertime Blues

I have not really been getting any painting done on my orks or anything else for a bit. Real life issues getting in the way and other interests with the warmer weather serving to distract me have come up here and there.

Mekaniks R Us

It has been some time since I posted anything new. This is partly because I have been doing a bit of playing (YAY!) and partly because I got a lesson in the new rules and how my codex has been changed. Mostly due to the effects of Mob rule and Fearlessness as it operates in 3rd edition my dreams of fielding a boyz based army will have to be modified a bit. I am still up in the air with regards to grots but it seems I forgot just how much armoured horror the humies is capable of. On the bright side I have been joined by a big mek with a big gun and a big tool...hey you don't have to have a female of the species for bigger to be better.
Dis Mek has an old school Shokk Attack Gun and a bit of conversion work. I know everyone is wetting thier pants about the importance of the Kustom Force Field and I may well do one but I could not let the chance to play with a SAG keep passing me by.

Orks of course are not a very shooty army. Anyone who has played against them knows this and while they can adopt shooty ways and even have some degree of sucess it just grinds against my instincts to not field slugga boyz. In spite of my protests I may end up assembling a unit of shoota boyz...but not anytime soon. Mean while I have unleashed my inner mek to get some dakka and put a little bollocks into the boyz to get em into the fightin faster.

First off the mek...then apparently the Power Klaw is gonna be needed a bit more than I had ever figured on so Da mek crew is at work on cobblin em together.

Da prototype was a bit big. I am thinking a greenstuff gauntlet will be less bulky even if it takes a bit longer to cure than plasticard ones...I am sure I can do plasticard as well but i end up using about enough grenstuff to build the glove just holding the card bits in place so I may just cut out the middle medium as it were. Still...the HUGE claw is kinda fun even if he needs a squig back to rest it on.

The armour plates seem a bit much as well...maybe I can take a surface molding and put it on like a decal...or if I just use greenstuff I can press the glyphs right into it for bas relief.

Ok but all of this is just the apetizer...on the the main course. This is a model I dreamed up an age ago partly thanks to Lobo that crazy Czarnian bounty hunter who would fit in well among the orks in spite of his coloring.

Meet...Waagh Dedeye's very first Deff Choppa. When asked about it Big Mek Strakk said "I saw dem panzy eldar flyin bikes and said to me grotz...We can do better dan dat ladz...lets get to cuttin!"

Sporting parts from Trakks, Warbikes, Trukks, Stormboyz dat went in 'ead first, and a few other bits and bobs I plan to do at least five of these ork jet bikes and may even do more cuz they are hella fun to build. I also need to do a battle wagon and some new trukks but I will have to wait for the wounds to heal and the glue to flake off...convertin aint easy.

I thought why should da ork be the only one to have some fun? So this snot gubbins fixer got his foot tangled up in the cable that holds the wing jet in place.
The core of the model is probbaly the trukk front end mounted on a 'wing' made from the back firewall of a gorkamorka era trukk...everything else is just spare bits...the nacesls might have been a bit much but its the mark I so I think future models may be slimmed down a bit.

The rear engine compartment is pretty well scratch built out of plastic card and bits of armor and trukk fender.

The stormboy rockets are great but I gotta make a mold of em or something because they are way too pricey. As simple as they are I am sure I can sculpt as many as I will need though.


The base is just temporary. Ultimately he will skim low over the ground jus high enough so that his bomb wont get set off hitting da boyz in the head...most of da time.

Next one might have a slightly enhanced wingspan. I don't want to get too crazy with it though. The temptation to go big with orks is such that you can easily get out of control if you dont riegn yourself in...I once had a biker with a banner so over loaded the bike kept falling down. there were about 40 trophy heads attached to it so it is understandable...but thats what trukks and battlewagons are for.

With true los nobody will complain if your models are easy to see...unless of course they end up blocking los to something they REALLY want to shoot at.

Converting ork vehicles is the best reason I can find for playing a more Kult of speed style army...seconded by the ability to take a turn without spending an hour moving your boyz.

After being painted those "anti grav" thrusters will be glowing with the pulsing force of the energy keeping the Choppa from hitting the ground.


Well ok so I don't have as much commentary as I have pics but a pic is worth a thousand words eh? Maybe five hundred in this case ...the direct sunlight made taking these fairly straightforward even if i did have to do it on the kitchen floor...Guess I could have put down a battle mat in retrospect.

Lemme know what you think.

First Battle Report

Ok well I forgot my Camera. One of the gentlemen at the event in question had his camera phone and said he would try and send me some pics. If that happens I will gladly post em. The battle was great. We both had a lot of fun and were delighted that the other guy was not an ass. We decided to go classic so annihilation with pitched battle setup for simplicity.
Orks deployed and went first. Turn 1..Orks..move move move move move run run run run run run...Tank takes a shot...falls short boo.
Turn 1 Tyranids...move move move move move run run run ...pot shot at the grots from the zoanthropes kill a few grots and an ork.
Turn 2 Orks...Move move move move run run run pot shot with cannon...hits...deals NO DAMAGE. Warbikes decimate Termagant brood between shooting and combat..two survive and are fearless Ork shooting is almost universally pointless.
Turn 2 NIDs ...
Ok It gets a little fuzzy on the details at this point...note to self..take notes during the fight..and bring camera.
Basicly we played two or three turns and had a huge melee in the middle of the battlefield...really we shoulda just deployed 12" apart and said lets get some.
Nobs mob was wearing out the big ugly thing with the cool base whose name completely escapes me at the moment. Bikers were set to join as was the nobs mob. One full mob of ork boyz and one half mob of ork boyz still in combat. Woulda been a great fight but we ran out of time as I had to head to work. I am starting to think maybe I need to do necromunda/mordheim stuff during the week..that or get a smaller more compact army/learn the rules backward and forward to speed play up a bit. Well we shall see.
In any case the orks may not have finished the whole battle but they looked pretty good on the field.

Illness Strikes down my streak.

Well I caught the flu and have been out of commission on painting or doing much of anything for the last few days. I am delighted to announce that I am FINALLY going to get a game in. Only 1500 pts., but still, a battle is a battle. I hope to get some pics and post...We will see. Gotta go. gonna try and build some trees.

Da Goff Mob

Here is a completely gratuitous shot of my blood axes just for the hell of it and because I set them up next to the goffs for comparison.

After about three weeks I have finished two mobs. One of Blood Axe Slugga Boyz and one of Goff Slugga Boyz. The practise from painting these guys has been a big help in redeveloping my painting muscles. I am pleased with the way the mobs turned out. They are not painted to the highest possible standard I could achieve by painting them one at a time but they are certainly a good deal better than basecoated. I got to do some conversions as sampled by these rokkit boyz.
When I made these there actually were no models to represent ork heavy weapon choices but there were a bunch of easy conversions to make big shootaz and rokkits. This is of course one of the best properties of doing an ork army, you don't have to be rembrandt to make a good conversion and have it look orky. I am capable of doing smooth conversions. The wild welding and melding of anything made of metal into trukks and battlewagons, big shootaz and rokkits is pretty kick ass.

This shot is of the whole mob.

I painted the Nob as a solo because he needed some work on his shoulder before he could be painted. The styling on the Gorkamorka Nobs is a bit more barbaric than the plastic boyz. Throughout the mob I used black and white Checkmarked patterns to act as one of the unifying themes. This combined with the black cloth and commonality of metal style, details and general orkishness should allow for a commonality of theme throughout my army without stopping me from doing different clans for different mobs.

The problem with doing a horde army can be that keeping track of individuals from different units gets a bit muddled. With black cloth in every unit I hope to see black and green and maybe red for eyes and decorations serve as visual connective tissue for the mass of orks. Here we see the Goffs moving toward the cardstock and plastick Ork fortress based on masonite and mounted with Gorilla wood glue.I hope to get the fort tricked out with some detail painting and of course base the base with flock and maybe some static grass. Static grass is great on bases for individual models but it does not lend itself nearly so well to terrain. At least not in my experience.

I took up a few close up shots of boyz with varying degrees of success. I really need to make myself use the tripod. I know that these pics are a bit out of focus but one thing is for sure taking a LOT of pics is a good way to get a few decent ones. Digital cameras are great in that regard. I used to spend a small fortune taking pictures on film and then getting them developed. Now I can take dozens of shots and just go through them for the best.

I am not a huge fan of how the highlights on the black came out with these I experimented on the Nob with some Hawk Turquoise and it has a lot of potential. I am thinking that doing fine line highlights with hawk turquoise may give me the best results so I am going to try it out on the next mob.

Photos are useful because they tell the truth and can really highlight errors and omissions. For instance this boy needs to clean the gun out of his gun barrel and grow some eyes.

This nob came out fairly well and did not take long to do all things considered. I am torn when it comes to painting orks as far as the tone of the skin. In the Lore the bigger and tougher the ork the darker the green of the skin. The problem is that I hate the ultralight ork skin that is sometimes done for orks. I plan to do my gretchin quite light skinned. Should make for an interesting contrast. Of course since character models are universally bigger and older orks they should have the darkest skin. Since they are character models I end up putting more time into getting subtler effects of shading which can really lead to brighter highlights.

I guess I can always highlight the boyz skin later down the road since it is just a matter of adding lighter layers for the most part. I did experiment with a superhighlight underneath with a green wash or Ork Flesh wash over it. The ultrahighlight worked out fairly well but the drybrush followed by a wash was crap.




Actually this guy with the iron gob is the drybrush-washed one.

This one is from the original group of ten or so that I painted a few years ago. I like the smoother transitions of shade to light on his skin.

Ok so the next step is to pain up my Warboss. I spent the last painting session fixing him and his arm whic is a custom conversion. I have done a bit of base coat and highlighted his skin. He should only take a few more sessions at most.

Mass Painting is Exhausting.

I think in the future I am going to limit the number of models I paint to between five and ten at a time. Painting twenty guys sounds good if you are basecoating for the minimum playable standard. Doing twenty guys for a more detailed level of painting runs into problems when you start doing detail because you keep running out of wet paint or have to keep adding water and paint to not run out. I also get a little blurry with what I have and have not done after a couple hours. Doing five or ten guys at most allows me to paint efficiently without having to do so much of the same thing all at once that I get bored and start just rushing.

Keeping my nose to the grindstone...or paint pallete.

Painting can be freaking exhausting. I have been trying to get in between four and six hours of solid painting a night. This is not always possible and I can see burnout looming on the horizon. I may just have to cut back to more task oriented goals. I want to post a step by step guide to the painting process for those who are not familiar with how easy model painting can be with the right techniques and tricks. I took an entire series of photos only to realize the memory card wasnt in my camera. So that will have to be redone. Who would have thought you could leave the film out of a digital camera?
The Goff Boyz are comming along...no pics but The skin is done. They are basecoated and actually pretty playable as is but of course that is not good enough. I am really starting to use the models as practice for some different techniques both to improve my painting and to see if I can find faster and easier ways to go. Overhighlighting with slightly garish greens and then doing an Ork Flesh Wash over that actually did not look horrific. I think just doing a basecoat of snot green and then washing it with green ink twice might give a reasonable facsimile of orkdom. I am not there yet. I prefer painting up in graduated highlights but I am beginning to think the Boyz are too dark a green. Well I guess I will get some feedback when I finally get a game in. The Warhammer Buffalo group on FB is up to almost 30 now. Hopefully people will add others as well. Some have already. So far though no games actually played by members except a couple of rounds of Mordheim with Chris S. from the BGS. Good time though. If nothing else we are introducing the concept of small scale wargaming as a possibility even for the anti painting crowd.

The power grows.

And here we have a completely gratutious pic of a couple of fantasy battle orcs I did for Mordhiem a while ago. Nothing great but nice simple paintjobs with a fair bit of detail and the always great Brian Nelson Orcs.

The more I am painting on a regular basis the more I feel the old skills returning. I have not painted this often in years and moving from the blood axes to the goffs I am currently painting I can really see a difference in the steadiness of my hand and the general profficiency with which I paint. I believe that if I keep this up I may be back to my old skill level again soon. THEN I will work to get better. Honestly wet blending and sculpting seem to be the only skills I am lacking...though I know that is a bit like saying oil painting and welding. I am playing my first game of war in ages this thursday assuming my erstwhile opponent can get his stuff together. We are going to play Mordhiem with some improvised terrain.

Wish I knew what happened to my terrain...I mean I had a frikkin CASTLE! where do you lose a castle?

MOB FINISHED!

FINALLY...finished with the first mob of boyz fully painted and ready to crush some humies. I have of course been reporting on these right along but now I have a complete 3o boy mob finished and ready to rock and roll. Only a hundred fifty or so to go lol.

I plan to do plenty of different clans but the Blood axes are the heart of my army and are therefore the perfect buncha the ladz to do first.

I will need to go through and add a few more blood axe glyphs since I quite like the contrast with the red against the cooler colors of the mob in general.

Blood Axes the second wave

Ok so to start with I finished up another eight new Blood Axe Slugga Boyz. Nine if you count the one that was being repaired (which I don't). This means I have seventeen Boyz finished including a Nob and three big shootaz. What's even better is that I learned a neat trick based on the diffused light BT mentioned. In the first pic of the new Boyz I just took the shot with as much natural light and as many light sources as I could but it still needed the flash. As you can see its clear enough but really bleached and overbright. Then I got an idea. If the flash was too bright why not just difuse it? SO after putting a small piece of masking tape over the flash I took the following pics which are, aside from som focus issues, much more what I had in mind for lighting levels.

Clear and fairly sharp with lots of detail but the colors much more closely resembling what the models look like in real life under normal lighting.

Obviously some are better than others and the bottom part of the 'filter' tended to slide up and let too much light out but I was able to fix that pretty easily by pushing it down again and retaking the shot. Digital is really great for the abundance of shots you can take while trying to get the best results.







Photography aside I am pretty happy with the boyz. Obviously I need to keep working on my skills since a fair bit of the line work on these guys is either too drastic or a bit sloppy. They are painted well beyond the minimum playable standard of course but that is hardly a claim to fame.

The above group shot was including the other painted Boyz just to get some pics of the mob as a whole so far.

Same here just a group shot of the mob.

I will finish up the remaining boyz for this mob and move on to the next over the next week or so. Goffs should go a LOT faster hehe. just prime..highlight...throw on some dags and checks and your good to go. Its near enough to make me go Goff. But not quite.

Good gaming folks. Please feel free to let me know what ya think.

P.S. If anyone knows how to move photos around in a post while you are creating it on this Blogger thing please let me know. I am trying to put up pics in a progressive sequence but if I accidentally delete one it get stuck up top. Thanks

I feel a bit bad about not having put up any pics for a few days. So here are a few of my trukk. This was actually hacked together back in the Gorkamorka days to accommodate more boyz than the original trukk model without getting so huge as to make it a ridiculously easy target. As Nick pointed out the newer models are a lot more interesting and beefy. I hope to pick up a few but will play with what I have or cobble together a truck from scratch out of the several old ones I had as well as some bulkheads ..tanks...random toys..what have you. The great thing about Orks for the conversion crazed Mek is that they do not have a neat and tidy style of design like some of the more stuck up armies out there. You really can go to town and as long as its Ded Hard and has lotz o' Dakka you are good to go...after all if its a vehicle it will probably get blasted to pieces on turn two at the latest.
This poor piece of wreckage seems to have lost its gun somewhere along the way though that is easily fixed.

As you may be able to tell I was experimenting with the different kinds of light available. Brendan had some good tips on multiple light sources and building a light box but at the moment I will have to make do until I can get a few bucks together for more lamps and such. I kind of like the pictures without the flash even though they don't show as much detail...or maybe BECAUSE they don't but they also tend to look more authentic and realistic. You only get flashbulb lighting conditions in life at public spectacles and in 40k probably when someone's plasma cannon overheats. It will be nice to have these pics up for when I do a new trukk so I can see the before and after. Meanwhile...enjoy this little piece of nostalgic conversion. Hey I just realized I can make the Ork Land Speeder I always wanted to and call it a dred kopta!! I better get some sleep first, once I get started it can be hard to stop...I don't really need ALL the old bikes (insert crazed laughter)

I am learning it's the details that take the most time. All the fiddling and fixing at the end of a model probably can take as much time as doing the highlights of any of the base colors. Guess this is why neatness counts throughout. My hand is not as steady as it once was, much like an athlete who has let himself go my painting skill and muscle memory have gone soft. With practice I am improving but my speed vs accuracy is the biggest hurdle. Much like archery, painting seems to be largely in the mind more than the hands. Visualizing your model is more important in many ways than actually being able to see it clearly since your hands don't use your eyes so much as your memory when painting. This is one of the reasons painting several of the same or very similar models at the same time is good because it is like getting out on the practice field and shooting over and over or if you are more academic in your metaphors like studying writing and reciting over and over to learn information.

Well I spent the whole morning yesterday ...or was it the day before? anyway...organizing my warhammer figures into some semblance of seperate games...armies...and thats about as far as it went. Still at least now if I need a model I know which bin to dig in. Got some work done on the boyz last night and should have five of them or more done tonight. A lot of what is giving me trouble is remembering how I painted the originals, getting my skills back in gear and getting into that groove where I can just rock on painting til its done and lose myself in the details.

change to page

Yea I know this doesnt look as cool but I just could not get the template to look right. Bugger it. At least this is legible.

The Dawn of the Waaaagh....I actually got this by mistake but it looked nice and ominous so I thought it would make a good opening shot for the first post with pics. Eventually I will have proper terrain and such to put under the boyz but for now its just the dining room table.
For my first post I just wanted to put up what I have done so far. This is actually a really pathetic showing for playing the Orks for so long. In my defense I already painted two Ork armies before this...the first was stolen and the second became obsolete thanks to Brian Nelson and his magnificent re-imagining of what Orks should be.

The first few images are of my blood axe boyz who are the spiritual heart of the army. I tend to think of my Waaagh as a Blood Axe Waaagh even when it was a Kult of Speed. I have a LOT more models assembled and painted to minimum playable standard but I am only going to post models I consider finished to this Blog. I may occasionally post other models from other ranges but more likely I will put them on a separate blog since this is really all about my ORK WAAAGH or WAAARGH as it was originally known.

In the background you should be able to make out a TRUKK which was the personal transport in my 3rd and 4Th edition armies of Grokka Dedeye and his Nob bodyguard. I am still learning how to photograph models but I have learned that sport photography settings seem best.

For anyone who doesn't know the Blood Axe Orks are known for their sneaky and untrustworthy nature as they actually bother to use more human style tactics and equipment as a result of extensive exposure to the Empire of Mankind. The interpretations they put on some aspects of human warfare are a bit odd at times but they find Cammos and stolen tanks with really massive guns to be a lot of fun.

Another pic of the Boyz in their Cammos. I really enjoy the contrasts from the shadow grey and the black next to the boyz green skin. It also looks spanking cool on vehicles, mega armor and well just about anything. I was going to do an ALL blood axe boyz army but frankly when i put down two hundred plus orks it gets a bit confusing if they are all painted alike and back-plates are bit hard to pick out from two feet away. That being the case I will do massive mobs of each clan eventually and sub groups of specialists painted appropriately to the clan or just based on my whims. I will probably do Burnaz as Bloodaxes. Kommandos too.

Here are some of the Goff Ladz. The only Orks more 'traditional' than them are the Snakebite clan. So I suppose that would make feral and snakebite boyz akin to natives out in the jungles or Pre- Colombian Amerinds and the Goffs are the Conservatives of Ork Kultur. They appreciate the good old days when you just got as many boyz as you could and went and beat and shot anything that wasn't green and black until all there was was green and black and then you went ahead and beat and shot that till it walloped ya back.

This last image is of everyone that is currently finished...I will put up more images as I get more guys done. I will also post some better pics of vehicles and such when I get a chance.

Day 1

This blog is intended to allow me to put some information on my modelling and painting up on the web mostly for my own vanity and because a few other people are doing it and it looks like fun.