Orctober cometh and it brings...Gretchin?

With my Madboyz finished I've gotten off to a great start for Orctober. Lets see if I can keep that up. The pile of unpainted, half assembled and mostly wrecked orcs in my collection might provide proper fuel. This sad mess has come into existence through that unique combination of impulse purchases, half finished projects and too good not to scoop up second hand deals. Or as us hobbyist call it: the hobby. Time to turn the Orky bit of my hobby into something for the display case. I made a start by (re-)assembling my Killa Kans and adding a random Space Ork vehicle. Here's an end of the hobby day shot.

Quick someone go and get the WD-40!

I spent most of this weekend's hobby time clearing out my hobby room. Building a new shed forced me to move all the 'I can't quite throw that away' boxes into the room and it was utterly cluttered and unlivable (disclaimer: I'm a clean desk type psychopath). Throwing out about six garbage bags worth of abandoned projects, not quite as nice as I thought it would be scenery and 'interesting shapes' helped fit the rest of the pile into a corner of the new shed. With this done I turned my attention to my bloated bitsbox. I took a few hours to sort useful bits and throw out useless ones. Boring but necessary stuff (IMHO).

An unbelievable crapload of square bases turned out to be part of my unsorted collection of Warhammer crap valuable hobby items.

With the boring work finished I took an (unplanned for) Monday off to get some actual hobby time in. It being Orctober (and having hidden all my other projects in a freed up closet) I focused on Space Orks. I collected quite a lot of stuff in the above mentioned way. For the Monday I decided to assemble the six Killa Kans I had languishing in a box. Three of those I bought and started on when they where newly released (White Dwarf made me do it!) and the other three sort of drifted to the top when I bought a random 'I abandoned the hobby' box. I decided to restore these Bob Ross' style: no true plan, no mistakes, just happy little accidents.

There's me building models without a manual wondering about people who can't even assemble IKEA furniture with one.

Restoring the Kans mostly just required a few dabs of glue (and recovering lost parts). One turned out to still be on sprue. I decided it needed a flamer. Having two other Kans with flamers meant I had to scratch built one. Re-ordening my bitsbox previously may have influenced this decision.

Never mind an engine, just get him more ammo!

I decided more flamer fuel is always good, so I added an oil drum and extra tanks to the model.

Insert obligatory Dakka Dakka Dakka here.

I also tried to give it a reasonably 'go-getty, burn, burn' type of pose. after all, inside each Kan is one hell of an angry grot trying to murder whoever steps in front of it.

Throwing bits at old Ork Trukk is not just fun, its therapeutic. 

With the Kans finished faster then expected I turned my attention to an ancient Ork Trukk (Gorkamorka era) that sort of sadly sat at the bottom of the Ork box. I've been meaning to convert this one into an Ork Buggy for a long time. Now was my chance. Above I've made some room for a bigger scale (modern) driver, added a few rockets and covered the boring flat back of the Trukk.

Insert obligatory 'Needs more Dakka' here.

More rockets where added (and I tested if the driver fit).

The backend of the vehicle needed some bits to, luckily I have a huge box full of those. 

I spent a lot of (happy) time adding doodads and making it all look a bit more convincing. Well convincing for an Ork vehicle...

Six Kans have been restored. 

Now that's what I call a day's worth of hobby well spent.

One Rokkit buggy is ready for combat.

I should have might have stripped the paint off, but I decided not to bother. That takes time. I was in full hobby Zen mode and it was the wife's turn to bring our kid to bed. I decided to turn this into a full on hobby challenge. How fast can I paint this lot?

Metallic spray applied.

There's a slight hindrance to this challenge. I can't quite decide on an Ork Klan. My Space Ork army consists of Bad Moons but I would also like to paint some Goffs or Blood Axes or Freebooters or Evil Sunz (or Snake Bites or Death Skulls). In short: I need to turn myself immortal or stop time (or maybe both). While wondering how to do that I decided to stave off Ork Klan-decisions and go for a basecoat of rust.

Adding paint helps make this look less like a mess of glue and plastic. 

I primed the lot German Grey and then used the very dark AK Gun Metal to give them a metallic basecoat.

Maybe I should've just stopped painting at this stage and called them 'tabletop ready'.

Next was a quick semi-zenithal spray of VGC Chaimail.

I could've skipped a lot of steps above if I had just started out with a bronze color. 

I followed this up with a very thinned down coat of VMA Hull Red. This was so thin I accidentally turned the paint job into some sort of bronze look.

Note to self: you're almost out of VMA Rust. Buy a new pot.

Still in my Bob Ross vibe I applied (slightly less thinned) VMA Rust in patches.

Leathery rust.

This was followed up by VGA Leather Brown in patches.

Time to add some color to the rust, typing this I suddenly remember I meant to add some purple tones this time. Missed chance.

Now time to have some fun. I added patches of VMA Fire Red in random places. Rust is a colorful thing after all.

At this point another WD-40 joke should be added.

I followed up with patches of VMA Light Red.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love owning and using an airbrush?

As a final step I added some VGA Hot Orange to 'make it all pop'. Now those are some properly rusty Ork vehicles. As a bonus I'm completely zen after playing with rust colors. Only problem is I have no clue how to follow up from here...

Alclad II protects the paint and gives a nice base to add some oil and weathering effect. If only I could decide what to add...

Time for more delay. I finished this layer up with some Alclad II Aqua Gloss. This protects the rust paint job and is a base to salt weather or hairspray the models from. After applying the gloss coat I decided to add some yellows and off-whites to two of the Kans, but it looks awful. It also made me doubt my 'more Bad Moons' answer to which clan to choose. Luckily it was also time to go to bed so I get to postpone this decision by at least a day. We'll just see where this project'll take me. I plan to have them finished by the end of the week, so decisions will have to be made*.
* This is a fake deadline, I've taken the advise over here at Leadplague to heart.