Oldhammer Goff Ork Unit, and a few thoughts on batch painting

I've no idea why this should be the case, but the numbers of views that this blog usually gets have leaped up with the last two posts. The last post, with the ork robot, got about seven times the number of views that the average post gets on this blog. I have no idea what has caused this, but I suspect that they represent bots drawn to this blog like vultures to a man lost in the desert. I expect that the next couple of posts will be hugely disappointing and normal non-service will be resumed.

Anyhow, I've been painting some plastic Goff orks from the 1990s. Back in the day, they were available on their own in a unit-filler set of ten, and also in a boxed game along with gretchin and (of course) space marines. They're not technically monopose, as the right arm is separate and could be stuck on at a range of exciting angles, but really, there's not a lot of variety.

I painted them in groups of three, and for some insane reason tried to vary the outfits so that none of them were identically dressed. I don't know why I did this. The models are pretty decent, and have a nice balance of simplicity and detail, but I don't really enjoy batch painting and I was a bit tired of it by the end. I did save one bloke and painted him up with more detail and fancy golden horns to represent a champion for the unit.

Here is the champion.

I think they're quite cool, but they do make me wonder about painting squads. Since I very rarely play any games, is there any point to batch painting? I have a lot of nostalgia for old Fantasy Battle armies, with their matching uniforms, and it would be nice to own one. However, I'm used to the idea of small units where each model is a character - as you'd seen in Mordheim, Necromunda and the Frostgrave games. 

Besides, painting several miniature at once removes some of the pleasure of individual painting. When I'm doing one model at a time, at some level I'm wondering what this particular guy wears, what his function is, and so on. Obviously you lose a lot of that sense of painting individual characters when you're doing a whole load at once.

That said, I've got a small Bretonnian army to paint. Hmm. Anyhow, the next post is going to be something small and individual. Maybe from Necromunda...