Orctober has begun, and I already have a head start...

The season of 'named' painting months: Orctober, Nidvember and Deadcember has begun. Usually I get around to observing these by the time the months end, but this time I have a head start as I've already started working on my old Orruks in September. This Monday I finished the second chariot from my restoration project.

Don't know why, but I'm a big fan of this Orruks expression.

This chariot has been featured in my earlier post here. It was missing the entire yoke so I replaced it with plastic chains from a couple of old Bretonnian sprues. A few riders for my chariots were missing so I purchased a small box of four extra (snap-fit) Orruks. Bad idea, these have their shields lumped on their arms. The sprue is now stuck in my bits box. I'll find a use for it someday.

The chains to replace the missing yoke work well enough (just don't allow any real charioteers to look up close ;)

Instead of these Orruks I've used the body of a 40K Runtherd as the boss in this chariot. I've also remodeled the great spear so he's holding it straight up. No mystery as to who is the Da Great Khan of this unit (even though there are no rules for a commander I still want one). I'll probably go back to this unit later to fix a slight gap in the large spear.

So you managed to survive a big Orruk lance, biting boars and scythes? No problem, I'll stab ya!

I've turned the boy in the back around as there was no way to fit him in facing to the front without either looking silly or as if about to stab his boss. As he's no Skaven I turned him around, ready to stab the hell out of any hapless survivors.

Two chariots are ready to ride, three more to go.

So this brings my painted chariots to a grand total of two. Work has already begun on the other three. Here is a quick older picture of where I started out from last month.

The five chariots at the start of September. 

I've taken the last three of the chariots and started out by stripping of as much of the paint as possible. As always I've used Bio-strip 20 for this miracle.

Plastic model covered in (un-thinned) layers of paint? Apply Bio-Strip...

...wait a bit....

The nice thing about Bio-Strip is that (after a bit of a soak) you can use an old toothbrush and water running from the tap to get rid of it. It leaves no smell behind and for a lot of paint jobs a single application is more than enough. For some of these old Orruks two did not quite completely do the job.

...rinse under running tab, apply toothbrush (sorry toofbruz) and the problem is solved.

As you can see the chariots are clean enough to repaint properly. Some of the old glued connections broke and had to be fixed as well. I also had to co-opt a few left-over 40K Ork bodies to fill out the chariots, luckily these are reasonably compatible (just watch out for bolts and bullet jewelry and it is ok).

The trick with chariot crew is even though you have to paint them separately, you do want to make sure they will fit.

Above is a test build of one of the other chariots. And here is are a few more shots of the 'final three'.

My final three chariots with their crew failing to keep their feet (drunk Orruks).

The same chariots with their basecoats applied. 

I'm not going to talk too much about these as they are not finished yet. As you can see the chariots have been covered with the Mournfang Brown base coat from a rattlecan (this speeds up the paint work a lot). The bases have been decorated and sprayed with a cheap black base coat, the orcs themselves have been basecoated with Vallejo Black (for the airbrush) and I've airbrushed their basic skin tone on as well.

Is there such a thing as too many Snotlings? (answer: yes, they are quite useless to be honest (but the sculpts are fun!)).

Of course chariots are not alone on the menu. I've also been working on and off on two Stone Trolls (almost done), and on the unit of 20 boyz (not even close to done), a shaman, pump wagon, a unit of Moonclan Grot Spearman and a number of Grot war machine crews are also on the table. I added my blob of Snotlings to the pile. Somehow these give me the feeling I can paint them quickly, making it possible to take both the bases of these guys and the pump wagon of my 'to-do' tray. In other words, time to apply more green.