Ork buggy finished

I finished my Ork Buggy this weekend. This vehicle started its life as an Ork Trukk for Gorkamorka. The wonderful combination of scale creep and improvements to model production made it too small to seriously represent a Trukk on a modern gaming table. It does - as far as I'm concerned at least - make for an excellent Ork Buggy, with plenty of dakka as required.

Now to find some suitable targets.

It also represents another Ork miniature finished during Orktober, always a nice bonus. Painting this weekend was an odd combination of great fun and extreme disappointment. As I mentioned in my previous post, I could not figure out what Ork klan to go for so I painted this vehicle and six Killa Kans in rust colors. In the end I landed on Evil Sunz Speed Freaks for my color scheme. Red goes faster after all. The rust works well as a basecoat. Red applies wonderfully over brown and the patchy rust colors just add to the effect. washing the buggy with an oil wash (mix of brown and black) helped grime it up wonderfully and blended the decals in as well. I even had some fun applying Typhus Corrosion (very sparingly).

Here's the buggy without paint just as the conversion part was finished.

The disappointing part of the painting process this weekend was caused by the Killa Kans. I painted these red as well and then decided on cleaner metal for the limbs and a random selection of parts to improve contrast. As Ok models have a lot of - shall we say - texture I decided to use the airbrush to repaint the metal parts. Unfortunately this meant masking the red/rust parts. Luckily I found my old pot of Vallejo Liquid Mask. Alarm bells went off in my head, but I couldn't quite remember why. So I applied this horrid material to my models using an old brush (liquid mask murders brushes). This took quite a lot more time then I wanted to. Next I tried airbrushing a metal airbrush paint onto the Kans. Here trouble started.

If I could turn back time...

The metal paint apparently had flakes big enough to instantly clog up my cleaned airbrush. Cursing myself (and covered in blown back metal paint) I cleaned the airbrush again. Thoroughly. With acetone. It instantly clogged again. At this point I sighed and stepped up from an 0.2 to an 0.4 needle. My airbrush clogged up still. Frustrated I abandoned the airbrush notion and took a rattlecan with Leadbelcher I had sitting unused to do the job. Not a smart move. I've been using airbrush to prime and paint for so long, I forgot how large the spray area of a rattlecan is. With my Kans covered in a way too thick layer of Leadbelcher I realized my compounded mistakes (I also remembered I had a pot of excellent airbrushable metal within reach). Things got worse after the Kans dried. I suddenly remembered why Liquid Mask set off alarm bells in my head. This stuff is hell to remove, especially from bumpy models and hard to reach areas. As I spent an unpleasant hour with blue tack (badly) cleaning a single Kan, I realized that I should've just brushed on the metal. It would have saved me a lot of time and my Killa Kans would actually have looked good (or at least up to my painting standard). Now as they stand covered in globs of paint I can only think of one option: Biostrip-20 and restart. For now I've decided to abandon the Kans. I focus on something different first and get back to them later (maybe around the time plastic models are considered Oldhammer ;).

 Hey not all hobby projects have a happy ending ;)