Ever wonder were all the undead Orcs are? Wonder no more: they're right here and ready to Wuuurgh!

Overposting week continues (it's like shark week, but with less sharks). I had one hell of a joyful moment whilst perusing 3D-printable models when I discovered that Avatars of War makes STLs. I have quite a few of their models in my collection  and now I can enjoy more of their work. To make things even better: they have non-human undead models. With great joy I printed (and painted) my first ten Undead Orcs. 

Wuuurgh (It's like Waaargh, but for undead).

As far as I know the only non-human undead by GW are the Cursed Company and that's out of production. Despite the pretty illustration of the undead Orc in the first Doomstones Book (if I recall correctly), somehow it never occurred to either Old World or Mortal Realms Necromancers that there must be a nigh infinite amount of Orc/Orruk bones littering the lands (and then you have all the other Greenskin variants to pick from too). So, sadly, we get armies consisting of human bones only on the battlefields. A brief spark of joy at seeing undead Skaven was quickly extinguished when the background story went for a silly half horse/half rider tale for the Nighthaunt Glavewraith Stalkers. Outside of GW I know of (and own some of) Die Hard Miniatures' excellent mixed race undead units (both for sci-fi and for fantasy games). Unfortunately you are limited to one pose for each species. 

Thanks to Avatars of War I can finally field a unit of undead Orcs. 

The printable Undead Orcs by Avatars of War are multipart. After printing the bits you can glue arms, hands, heads and bodies together to taste (or use Meshmixer of course). This give you acces to a seriously large variety of shuffling dead Orcs. The models are very detailed and I love the basic poses. The only minus as far as I'm concerned are the oversized weapons. There's nothing wrong with a good Conan-sized (i.e. unwieldable) axe in fantasy, but to my taste some of the weapons on these Orcs go right into the realm of Dragon-Age unwieldable (Q: "Is that a two-handed sword on you back?" A:"No it's my dagger." My butter fingers had some trouble snapping the supports of the skeletons themselves. That's not something Avatars can help, as I added my own supports. I easily fixed most breaks with superglue and a few hard to fix breaks by printing new Orcs. The cost in resin for a unit hovers somewhere between 5 and 10 euro I think (5 and 10 dollars, ha the new exchange rate does make some things easier!). 

 

Printing multi-part Undead Orcs is quite a lot of fun (and I solved the breakage of some bones by simply printing a few extra bodies).

Painting the Undead Orcs was a blast (painting undead without too much cloth on them always is (hint,hint GW)). I started with a red-brown primer (Vallejo German Red Brown to be precise). I was in a Blanche frame of mind I guess. I followed this up with a succession of semi-zenithal sprays of VMA Dirt, mixing in VMA Ivory as I went along. I ended this process with a (mostly) pure Ivory layer of paint on top. All the metal bits where painted Vallejo Metal Color Steel and drybrushed with Ironbreaker. I contrast painted all straps with a random brown and painted the shields Khorne Red, followed by a (subtle) Evil Sunz Scarlet overbrush. After gloss coating the lot I applied Streaking Grime (AK) followed by a cleanup with a make-up sponge. The most time consuming part was applying weathering powders to the metal (an old pot of rust pigment by Forge World). With that detail fixed and sealed in matt coat, I used a wash (Agrax) to get more contrast around the teeth and I gave the shield a drybrush with a mix of Ushabti Bone and Evil Sunz Scarlet. I followed this step up with some recess shades around the model to better pick out details. All-all it took me two evenings to get these painted, with most of the painting done around the Slaughterhorn Chieftain (I worked on these ten as that model was drying and vice-versa). Now if only there was an easy way to get more display case space...I may just have to deep-store older armies if this pace keeps up :o.