I Have A Plan - And Some Classic Ork Firepower!

So I had this random idea, and I thought I'd run it past both of my readers.

What if a bunch of painters bought a box of - say - ten minis each, painted the models, sold them on ebay and gave the profits to charity? I think that could be a nice idea. You could sell the painted models for anything from £40 to £150, depending on how well they were painted and who painted them. They would be fun to paint and you could try out a new paint scheme or models from a game you don't usually play (personally, I'd do a Blood Bowl team).

Unfortunately, I have virtually no clout in the painting/gaming community - not that I've ever looked for it. But it someone with a "name" picked up on the idea, or enough people went for it, I think it could be really effective. Of course, you'd have to rely on people to honestly donate the profits and not just pocket them, and there would be some showoff who tried to paint an entire army for it, but by and large wargamers seem to be decent people who would be willing to turn their talents to a worthy cause.

Does anything like this already exist? Would you consider doing it? If anyone fancies doing something like this one-box charity challenge, or has any idea on how you'd go about organising it, drop me a line.

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Right then. This week, it's space orks. I've been picking away at these for a long while, but I've got a batch done, and here they are.

I bought some metal guns off ebay, which originally came with 1990s Deathskull Lootas. They must have been some of the last old-style ork models. The guns are comically large and (of course) fit really badly with the ork models, metal or plastic. I used ancient shoulder pads to mount the guns and added handles made of a green stuff/milliput mixture.

I actually used an old metal madboy as the wielder of this weapon. For one thing, he's got a great expression and for another, you'd have to be mad to be carting this thing around. I think it's an autocannon.

He got a little plastic friend to act as a spotter. By turning the left hand the other way up (it's meant to be supporting his bolter) I've got him shielding his eyes. Shame his mate is looking in the wrong direction.

The next pair are both plastic models. Again, the gun took a lot of fitting. I've gone for the usual jolly freebooter/Bad Moon colours. 

And now onto the really fun stuff!

 The old plastic ork warbuggy gets a lot of stick for being a bad model but, once you factor in the odd design of the crew, I think it's perfectly decent. The detail is reasonable for a kit from 2000 or so, and you can add as much detail as you like to the big hubcaps and the front. It's also pretty easy to convert and customise.

The main problem is that the crew don't really look like GW orks. They resemble hefty humans (like House Goliath Necromunda models) with no necks. In sculpting terms they're not bad, although they don't resemble either the Oldhammer Paul Bonner-type orks, or the ape-like monsters from 3rd Ed onwards. If another company had made this model, it would be fine.

I particularly like the driver, with his deranged grin, and the guy operating the gun, who looks like an unusually green fat biker.

This model is pretty much as it came from the box, slightly repaired rather than deliberately converted. It was missing its banner pole, but I've got no great love for banners, and that won't be much missed. 

Broom!

I've got a Bretonnian leader to paint, but I'm trying to put him off, as it's a really daunting bit of conversion and painting work. Got to do it sometime, though!

Space Ork Kommando Skwad

 I thought I might quickly explain how I paint ork skin. Orks vary in colour from the quite drab to the lurid, and these days I tend to do it one of two ways, depending on the lightness.

Usually, I start with Vallejo Russian Uniform, a slightly drab colour that looks about 3/4 green to 1/4 grey. Then I give that two thin washes: one with dark green (GW Caliban Green) and one with Leviathan Purple contrast paint, watered down to be effectively an ink. The green one provides shadow. The purple one is important because purple is a "flesh" colour and gives the impression that ork skin is the equivalent of human skin (at least, that's the idea).

Then I highlight with a mixture of Russian Uniform and Game Colour Sick Green. Finally, I add some bright yellow (Warpaints Daemonic Yellow, to be exact) for the eyebrows and so on. And that's it, really! If I want an ork to have lighter skin (I assume younger orks and gretchin are more brightly-coloured), I would start with Sick Green as a base coat, used both washes and leave out the Russian Uniform.

Anyhow, on to the models. 

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First up, here's a random bionic ork. He's not actually a 40k model at all: he's an old Blood Bowl miniature, called cybork. But he certainly fits in with the others. As with so many of these miniatures, he's a nice sculpt and has a good mixture of detail and simplicity.

But now for something a bit more ambitious. Sometime in the mid-90s, towards the end of the old-style orks, Games Workshop produced a few kommando miniatures. Kommandos were wily orks who, instead of charging at the enemy, could creep into position, and were allowed to infiltrate on the board. 

The design of the miniatures is obviously a nod to WW2 British commandos, with their uniforms and wooly hats (with predictable ork logic, the Stormboys are equally obvious Nazis). As every British boy of a certain age knows, commandos are awesome. 

I'd painted some of these models a while back, but I wanted to spruce them up and bring them into line with the rest of my oldhammer force. That meant redoing the skin, as well as generally tidying the painting. While I had three of the same sculpts (there aren't many different models in this group), some of them had lost their original axes.

One got a dynamite stick made by drilling into the hilt of the broken axe and inserting a bit of string. Dynamite and kommandos probably go together quite well. The guy beside him got a knife from a leftover Warlord Games plastic Roman's sword. The shape looks quite like the classic fighting knives carried by WW2 commandos.

One of the models had been hacked to pieces, and was missing an axe and an entire arm. I did some repairs, and was pleased to find that a broken power claw fitted perfectly. He got a chaos bolt pistol to match, and is now the nob of the unit. 

Here he is with a friend.

The final two are unconverted. I really like the expression of the guy on the right. He's seen a lot and he's not having any.

One of the best touches about these miniatures is that each kommando is carrying a Swiss Army knife on his belt, just in case he has to open a tin or get a stone out of a horse's (or tyranid's) hooves.

And here, then, is the entire squad. They just need a suitably dramatic caption.

Deep in the storm-wracked ruins of Plogius Minoris IX, Leftennant "Grabba" Gutrog and his kommandos stealthily advance on the unsuspecting forces of the Imperial Guard.

You know, I never actually set out to make an oldhammer ork army. Oh well! Gork and possibly Mork must have willed it to happen!

Loads of Metal Space Ork Stuff

 Time for some orks! The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000 was a time of great disaster. It's definitely the point where the great grimdarking of Warhammer began, and the orks were hit especially badly by this. With the possible exception of some gretchin, I don't think any of the old models survived into the 2000s, which is a great shame. Still, the blood of martyrs is the heresy of eternal war, or something.

So, without further ado, here are some more old orks! 

First up, we've got two metal minis: a freebooter bad doc (that's a pirate mad medic) and a mek with a burner/flamer. These are such nice models. The detail of the sculpting is terrific on both models, with loads of cool touches. I particularly like the way that the mek is sculpted like a welder, rather than a soldier with a flamethrower. The doc is one of the meanest-looking old orks, and even by greenskin standards he's an ugly customer. The only bum note for me is the small hand hanging from his ear. I painted it like an earring or perhaps a decoration on his shoulder armour. 

Then here are two randos. The guy on the left is a Space Crusade plastic ork. He's not the greatest model in history, but he's got a certain goofy charm, and there's lots of space on the model to embellish him. On the right, there's a metal madboy with a custom weapon.

Madboys were an odd feature of the very complex 2nd Ed ork rulebook. They seemed to be suffering from various forms of delusion and mental illness, which probably wouldn't be treated so comically today, and gave the sculptors the opportunity to make orks with great facial expressions. This chap, I think, is feeling down. He is wearing an apron, and has some little tools in his belt, so perhaps he's a mek who is nervous about firing the ridiculous gun that he's just built.

And here are two plastic boys from the original ork boys set. They're a bit step down from the metal models, of course, and come in two weird poses: squatting as if about to have a poo, and creeping away to the right. Anyhow, they've come out alright, and bulk up the numbers reasonably well.

But that's not all! For the first time on this blog, I present... the ork wartrak.

Back in the ancient past of 1989, there were very few plastic vehicles (four, I think). Instead, ork buggies and the like were made of metal parts that you had to stick together. I found one of these, a wartrak, on ebay minus its mounted lascannon, and so I bought it.

Ye gods, this thing was a swine to put together. We can (sometimes rightly) complain about the complexity of modern plastic kits, but this thing was terrible. I pinned it, used green stuff and superglue, and every other trick I could think of, but it was a terrible struggle to get it to stay together.

It didn't help that I had to improvise a gun out of an old plastic bit (I've no idea where that came from), some plasticard and a sight off an modern Skitarri gun. I put it on a base for some small level of stability: back in 1989, you just plonked it on the tabletop.

Anyhow, at last I painted it, and quickly realised how much easier it would have been if I'd not stuck it together first. I gave the orks lighter skin than usual, just to make them stand out from their machine. I think these guys are probably Evil Suns, given that they use a lot of red, but they could still fit with the other chaps.

So there we are! Old orks is da best orks. Nuff said.

Scratch-built Ork Robots

 Hello again! 

This has been a good week to be an ork. Although I wasn't expecting to, I ended up getting a load of old ork models out and painting/repairing/improving them, including three dreadnoughts. Let's go!

About 20 years ago, my friend Owen gave me a broken AT-AT model kit. I sawed it up and used it to make the bodies of three ork dreadnoughts (or maybe robots, or something). One, which is yellow, I modified a couple of months ago. The other two were done over the last couple of weeks. This is the yellow model:

Now, onto the other flavours of robot tellytubby. The red one didn't need a huge amount of work. I added some more detailing and gave it a new, jollier paint job. I also replaced the gun I'd used with a big and suitably goofy laser from some toy that I dismantled years ago. His body is the AT-AT's head, up on end.

The blue robot took more work. I wasn't happy with either of his arms, so I made new ones. The gun comes from the same toy as the red robot's laser. The other arm is scratch-built. I was inspired in this by the work of Kishi Omori, a Japanese modelmaker who makes robots from junk. (His stuff is really impressive. Well worth a look.) I really like the jolly blue colour. I think his main body came from the AT-AT's butt. 

As you can see from this picture, all the robots have keys so that the orks can wind them up for action.

Orks are a lot of fun.

As a bonus, here are some old metal orks that I've been painting. Here's a painboy with a metal head and bionic arm. I gave him a mechanical gun-arm to suggest that he's entirely robotic.

And here is a goff ork boss. He's a slightly later model than the others, but he shares the old-school cartoony look, before the orks took a beating from the grimdark stick. He looks as if he's seen some sights.

And there we are. Oldhammer is great, orks are great. 

Shock Attack Gun!

 This week, I've painted a few more old space orks. 

First up, we've got a model that I've had for ages and have never quite dared paint: the shock attack gun. (Or shokk atak gun, or shok attak gun - there seem to be a lot of spellings.) To my mind, this thing is one of the holy grails of Oldhammer space orkness. It's a sort of shoulder-mounted heavy weapon, but that  doesn't do it justice. That's like saying that an elephant is shaped like a dog.

The shock attack gun is, in the 40,000 background, a bizarre heavy weapon invented by ork techs in order to fire snotlings (small, goblin-like creatures) at their enemies. The gun teleports the snotlings into position (roughly), with a variety of interesting potential effects. Depending on how you rolled on a table, the gun could cause frenzied snotlings to attack the enemy, or appear inside them, causing a vast explosion, or just blow things up. Alternatively, the gun could malfunction and teleport its wielder to who-knows-where.

In short, it was very random and orky. There have been three miniatures of the shock attack gun, as far as I can tell, and I managed to find the earliest version on ebay, going at a not-too-awful price. I think it looks very silly and is an absolutely superb miniature. The detailing is remarkable, especially when you reflect that it's hand-sculpted. The gun has a very Heath-Robinson look, with all sorts of cogs, belts, tanks, rotors, wires, vents and pipes. It seems to have a tap on the back and an egg-timer on the side - because, if you're an ork, why not?

Anyhow, it was a real pleasure to paint and will be a nice addition to my small force of old-school orks.

I also painted an ork in heavy armour. Someone had removed his original gun, which I replaced with a plastic bolter. He's a nice model. It's always weird to realise how very small these guys are. I do have some more recent plastic black orcs, from Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I reckon they could quite easily be painted and converted as friends for this guy.

And finally, here's a Gorkamorka boy (or maybe a yoof). These plastic miniatures are largely forgotten now, and they occupy an odd niche between the goofy orks of 2nd edition 40k and the hulking monsters of post-2000. Taking that into account, they're quite reasonable plastic miniatures for the time, but I doubt they're loved that much these days. Anyhow, this chap has quite a cool pose.

So that's the orks for now. I've absolutely no idea what I'll paint next. There's quite a queue. 

Even More Orks

 More orks! I find that projects blur into each other these days, which probably means that I get distracted too easily. (There are still a few Eschers to go...) Still, orks are fun to paint, and I will put the remaining ones to the side for a little while now. Maybe.

First up, we've got another mek from the 2nd Edition, as seen in the blue Citadel catalogue. This guy has a kustom weapon in his right hand, which is superbly sculpted and has loads of cool details. I wanted to give him another big gun - he's the unit's inevitable crazed shooter - held up in a fairly similar manner but in a slightly less "flat" posture. I cut and repositioned an old plastic arm, which was much harder than I'd expected it to be. I ended up adding a damaged marine shoulderpad to hold the whole thing together.

His new gun was made from a damaged old ork bolta, with a new bigger magazine and a barrel built from - of all things - an ork axe. It has big bolts and a spiky bit. 

Painting him was easy and enjoyable. There were loads of interesting bits and bobs on the model, but it wasn't excessive and there was enough space to add stripes and other marks, including some bluing on the kustom gun's barrel. His eyes are a bit crazy, but then he's probably seen some things. I'm really pleased with this guy.

Then we've got two models that almost nobody seems to have any nostalgia for. They're plastic boys (or perhaps "yoofs") from the old game Gorkamorka, which was a sort of Necromunda with orks in a Mad Max-type setting. It was very short-lived and marks the point where the ork models moved from the goofiness of 2nd Edition 40k and Paul Bonner's pictures to the over-muscled, mantrap-faced creatures we have today. 

These definitely aren't the best ork models in either variety (in fact, they seem to sit uncomfortably between the two styles). They've got very small heads and, despite their high shoulders, fairly human proportions. You could mistake them for Goliath gangers. Anyhow, they're not the greatest miniatures, but they'd do as a couple of minor hangers-on for a warband. I don't really enjoy painting fur very much, but otherwise they were alright to paint.

Out of interest, I've painted ork skin in two different ways. One is to work from a fairly bright mid-tone green, washing it with dark green and (very thin) purple, and then highlighting with yellow (and pink for lips). The other is to start with a drab military green, and then proceed as before. I suppose that the lighter orks might be younger, but I don't mind having a variety of different skin tones in the ork horde: for one thing, you get a variety of tones in human skin, and for another, the repeated colours and styles in the clothing ties them all together. I doubt the orks care very much, so I won't.

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And now for something completely different. I have a Bretonnian army to paint! I have stripped all of my old metal and plastic foot-soldiers, which comes to about 40 models. I plan to paint three main units, in roughly the same colours as the GW studio army featured in White Dwarfs 136 and 137. 

There will be three main units: foor knights (yellow tunics), archers (blue and white) and men at arms (green and white). I don't want this to end up as a chore, and I'd prefer to avoid painting in bulk. So, I thought I'd try painting one of each type, then a different model, and then more Bretonnians. I don't know if this will work, but I think it could make it a more entertaining process.

The Obligatory Orktober Post

 October is a funny month. Here in the UK, it's when the clocks go back (or forward? I can't remember) and it marks the start of five or six months of cold, snowless slush. It's also Orange Plastic Tat Month, or Halloween as it is also known, and model-makers everywhere are plundering the shops for useful terrain. And it contains several Oldhammer events, the greatest of which is surely Orktober, where everyone paints some kind of orc. There's also the less-snappily-named Zomtober, when people paint zombies, but I did that a couple of posts ago. And apparently there's Dreadtober, where you paint a dreadnought, although I think that would sound better as Dreadcember.

Anyhow, not wishing to miss out, I painted two orks.

 The guy on the left is a medic that I've had lying around for a while. He's very obviously an alternative sculpt on another body (basically, an alternative head) and while he's not a terribly exciting model, he was quite pleasant to paint. I reckon these metal ork specialists must have been quite popular models, as there always seem to be a lot of them knocking around on ebay.

The model on the right is slightly odder. He's actually a looter from the Deathskull clan, and was released after Rogue Trader and the blue Citadel Catalogue, but before the major change in style in the orks that happened around 1998 or so. Nonetheless, he's slightly different: his face is longer and slightly less cartoony, and his proportions are more humanoid (I actually wondered if he was a converted Delaque ganger from Necromunda). He originally came with a massive heavy weapon, but I got him without arms and so added some classic ork ones.

He was actually quite a pain to paint. Sometimes a model just won't look right, no matter what you do. Eventually, I got him to look fairly piratical. I'm starting to wonder if I'm collecting an Oldhammer ork army. After all, I've got about 20 men, a dreadnought and a vehicle, which is about enough for 2nd edition!

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...

Ork Dreadnought Time!

 So, Toby, how's that project to repaint all your old Brettonians going? Well, it's not really started yet. In fact, I'm still not entirely sure how to spell Bretonnia. On the other hand, I did rebuild and repaint an ork dreadnought that I scratch-built many years ago. The best laid plans of squig and man, as they say...

The main body of this thing is some kind of broken toy that I was given by a friend. The legs are landing gear from a marine flyer. The guns come from a very cheap walker from (I think) a Russian wargame (again, I bought these a decade ago, so my memory isn't great). The rest is stuff from the bits box.

I tried to give the dreadnought a wonky, awkward look like a clockwork toy. The clockwork key at the back was a late addition, made from plasticard and a bit of rod. I did wonder if it was a bit too silly, but you probably can't overdo it with old fashioned orks.

Just in case anyone's wondering (which I doubt), the yellow was painted over several thin coats of pink. The metal is done with a base coat of dark brown, onto which dark grey is roughly drybrushed. Then increasing amounts of plate metal and silver are added to the dark grey, all the way up to pure silver for chips and scratches. I find that the dark brown gives the metal a tarnished look that suits orks and heavy machinery.

I don't intend to make a big force of these old orks. For one thing, the metals are expensive and the early plastic orks aren't that great (and are expensive). But a small skirmishing group would be fun - and very Rogue Trader, where twenty men, one dreadnought and a converted shampoo bottle constituted an entire army.

Even More Space Orks - Weirdboy and Painboy

 So, after all that stuff about repainting my ancient Brettonia models, I've thrown myself into Oldhammer with a vengeance and painted some... space orks. These days, grimdark is very big again (did it ever go away?) and I don't seem to be able to open Instagram without seeing a sepia demon made of severed legs and barbed wire vomiting mud onto the baby Jesus. Ever one to jump onto a bandwagon (or battlewagon), here are some more bright green orks from the good old days.

First up, here's a weirdboy, an ork psychic. This guy is from the Blood Axe clan, but let's ignore that. The important thing is that he's an absolutely awesome sculpt. He seems to be dressed like a mixture of a Napoleonic soldier, a voodoo priest and a majorette, which fits the semi-military look of the Blood Axes perfectly. He also just looks absolutely brilliant.

This model was unusually large for an old ork sculpt. I'm pretty sure he's an original, as the base tag even said "wierdboy" (sic). I mounted him on a bigger base. He was missing the top of his staff, so I made a new one with an Empire bit. The laurelled skull matches his hat. His left arm was made from an newer plastic ork bit with an ogre hand and a lot of green stuff: partly to keep in scale with his body, but also because he needed a sleeved arm to match the metal one. 

Then we've got a super painboy (medic) miniature. In the old background, orks didn't have hair, so they sometimes put hairy squigs on their heads. That's what this chap has got. He's also got a brilliant expression. Many of the old orks have real charm and personality - not that I'd like to meet this guy and his massive pliers.

Here are three plastic boys that I painted over a little while. They're not the best miniatures, but they've come up alright. Getting the plasma gun to sit on the model's shoulder - and getting his hand to hold it - was really difficult, and I ended up using a lot of green stuff and additional parts to make it look reasonable.

And that's it for now, but more plastic orks will be appearing soon. Watch this space!

Oldhammer Ork Battlewagon Conversion (Or Something Like That)

Brace yourself, as this is going to be a long post!

A few years back, I went to a model show in Milton Keynes. At a table I found someone selling one of the most recent ork battlewagons for £10. It's not a miniature I've ever liked especially, and this particular model was absolutely wrecked, even by space ork standards: some parts were broken, others were missing, and a lot of the detail had been gunked up with plastic cement. However, these things retail for new at the outrageous price of £70, and this sorry example could be chopped up and used for other things. So I bought it.

And it stayed on a shelf for several years. Eventually, as part of my retro ork unit, I thought it would be nice to give the orks some kind of vehicle in which to commit their acts of cartoony piracy.

The original ork battlewagon dates back to 1990 and sells on ebay for about £200 - not money I'm willing to pay. I stumbled upon a guy selling a resin version, which was a slightly basic, rather chunky copy. I bought it off him, and decided to use some of the resin bits and some of the ruined plastic kit to make something a bit like the original 1990s battlewagon.

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In order to get some ideas, and to get a better sense of the proportions of the old battlewagon, I bought several copies of White Dwarf that date back to 1990 or so: issues 128, 135 and 136. 

 I'm not going to go into much detail on this, and other people have done much better reviews of old White Dwarfs, but they really are extremely different to the current version. In fact, they're very different to White Dwarfs from twenty years ago. The early 90s WD is full of good stuff in a way that more recent versions aren't: there is virtually no filler at all.

For one thing, they don't just preview the upcoming ork army books: they give away big chunks of rules and points for different sorts of new unit. Issue 128 gives you templates, rules and instructions to convert your plastic battlewagon into a gun-wagon (you use a biro for the barrel). If that's not enough, issue 136 shows you how to make an ork tank from scratch, using absolutely no GW products whatsoever. And you get rules for it. 

Interestingly, some of the painting and converting is excellent, and some of it is very basic. White Dwarf seems to have been happy to field models painted in flat colours, without shading or highlighting, and is refreshingly honest about the need to do so when a game is coming up.

They really are magazines by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, without any of the waffle and hard sell of the later editions. No wonder I got into this hobby, and no wonder that I don't buy White Dwarf anymore. 

Anyhow, back to the tank. 

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The old battlewagon is an odd model, clearly as much an influence on the modern ork trukk as the recent battlewagon kit. It is a cross between an armoured car, a dragster and a pickup truck, with three main parts: the boxy cockpit, the open area in the middle where the ork passengers go, and the engine at the rear. The wheels are massive and armoured, with little ground clearance. It doesn't have any mounted weapons: gunfire is provided by the mob of excitable passengers firing their weapons out of the back.

To make this vehicle, I used the big resin wheels from the ebay kit, along with the cab and the back part (the cargo area) of the plastic GW model. After a lot of thought, I decided to put the big wheels beside the cargo area and not behind it, as is the case in the original 1990s model. That would just make the battlewagon look weirdly long. Attaching the wheels was tricky and required pinning. I made spacers from those little plastic discs that plastic Mantic soldiers come on.

However, the battlewagon did need an engine, which had to be mounted at the rear. I found a set of Mantic terrain that I'd never assembled, which contained a cylindrical boiler thing. I added a load of additional parts to this, including an ork control panel, a gun from the Adeptus Mechanicus (now an exhaust) and a weird motor thing that came off a model tank.

Here's the boiler in place at the back of the battlewagon. You can see the huge resin wheels!

Of the two turrets, one was a complete mess, having been hacked off at a strange angle. I rebuilt it with clay and green stuff (only partially successfully) and put part of a Tau drone on top. It fitted very well. The other turret got a round piece of plastic, origin unknown, to act as a lid.

As the world of miniature painting seems to be getting more and more sepia and mud-coloured, I decided to paint this thing bright yellow. That meant undercoating it in pink and building up from there. I was worried that the combination of the yellow of the Bad Moons and the check patterns favoured by the orks would make it look like a taxi, but it seems that the old versions just didn't care about this, so I went ahead and used both.

If anyone's interested, I painted the metal in six stages: black undercoat; dark brown; drybrush of dark grey mixed 50:50 with boltgun metal; boltgun metal drybrush; and silver drybrush. Some areas were then washed with strong tone to make it look grubby. Someone once pointed out that ork vehicles would be greasy rather than rusty, as they're frequently used, so I followed that idea and didn't add any rust.

I painted a moon with sunglasses on top of one of the hatches, which I copied from a photo of a banner in one of the old White Dwarfs (Dwarves?). I also added some Jerrycans from an old tank kit, which were painted red for a bit of variety.

And here is the finished machine! I really like this thing. I feel that I ought to add more detailing, but to be honest I think less might be more here. It's not a perfect copy of the old miniature, but I think it captures much the same look, as if the old model evolved for the present.

Neeeeow!