Botwt's Hobby Blog

Finally I have all of my orcs done for the Warbands challenge. Between working on these guys, painting my friend’s birthday gift, creating a few Lord of the Rings conversions (will paint them up soon) and working on a Star Wars commission project I have been a hobby-madman this month!

One thing I hate to do is batch painting, so what I did was to make each orc a unique looking fellow (barring the two plastic orcs). Tried to give each one a wee bit of different coloring to his skin, different color schemes for their cloth and even added a bit of humor to three of the orcs…I call these guys ‘the rooster’ and his two ‘hens’.

Angmar/Mordor Orc Warband

I picked up the PuppetsWar Grim Reaper model for my best friend’s 42nd birthday…nothing says you’re getting old like getting a Grim Reaper for your birthday! I’m such a horrible dick! LOL

Grim Reaper

While I work on a commission project and my monthly challenge for One Ring I have been breaking up the time by adding to my spectre ranks by digging through my parts drawer and finding leftovers to slam together…here is going to be a female spectre wielding a broken sword. I still need to tatter up her clothing, but thought I’d post her as is for a WIP update.

First off let me tell you straight up, I hate spiders…they scare the shit out of me! Now with that in mind, when I saw the Games Workshop Giant Spiders they never gave me an iota of dread…not even a momentary shiver; then I saw the Giant Spiders from eBob Miniatures, and these things creeped me the hell out. After having these pieces in my collection for well over two years now I have finally gotten the balls to paint these things up.

In the photos shown above you can see that the legs and the bottom of the carapace are the same for each spider, however there are three different body types that I displayed alongside to show you the variants in selection. Assembly is demanding of your patience and steadiness of your hands…these took me about two hours just to assemble the spiders due to my MS…I’m sure you guys probably won’t have the issues I had. Here is a link to the assembly instructions.

Once I was sure the glue was completely dry I re-positioned them in three different poses to suit the bases they were placed on. I put them onto normal Games Workshop 40mm round cavalry bases, however they do come with a low profile 40mm base that doesn’t quite match up height wise with the GW bases and that little difference in height wasn’t something that I could live with…hehe.  For the color scheme I painted them in varying shades of blacks, browns (added a little green to one) and greys. The eyes were done with a high gloss black ink.

Giant Spiders

For this month’s challenge we are doing ‘Warbands‘, and needing some orcs for my Angmar and Mordor armies I decided to go in that direction. I have had several of the 14 original metal orc warriors in my collection for some time now and figured this would be a good time to get some of them painted. For this challenge we need to have 1 Hero and 8-12 Infantry Units…I have decided to start at the minimum of 8 orc warriors and if time allows I will add to that number. I also created my own hero model from the remnants of a Gothmog, a Hasslefree goblin head, a plastic orc and lots of green stuff.

Now, onto finishing my last spider before working on these guys.