Howdy Folks,

Over on my showcase post Jules asked if I would do a step by step for painting my converted Savage Orc Bloodbowl team – The Green Fist Smackaz.

I’d be happy to Jules!

First thing to note, these won’t be winning any Golden Demons anytime soon, like most of my miniatures, I paint these to a good tabletop quality. What do I mean by that? I mean they look good from the typical distance between your eyes and the game playing surface. This means I’ll mainly be sticking to base colouring, avoiding fancy layering or line highlighting techniques. There you go, disclaimer over, you’ve been warned!

1) Priming

Long term fans of the blog will not be surprised that I use coloured spray primers here. 90% of a Savage Ork is green skin, so we might as well get that stage out of the way relatively painlessly and in a short space of time!

I use Army Painter Coloured Primers for these guys, in fact I used three in a super easy Zenithal Highlight method. The only downside here is that I’m not a big fan of Army Painters Coloured Primers, I mean sure – the range of colours is great, but as sprays go, they tend to nearly always come out a little scaly or dusty. You’ll see what I mean in the images below. Don’t be put off though, I do address this flaw later on!

Basically you have to start with your darkest colours working your way lighter, and as you do, increase the angle from which you spray. So for us start off by spraying the whole Orc Angel Green, then from an angle of about 40 degrees spray Greenskin from above, finally from an angle of maybe 20 degrees hitting just the most upward facing surfaces spray Goblin Green.

Of course, if you’ve got an airbrush you could avoid the dusty look altogether, you’d just need three greens similar to the colours above, and otherwise follow the same method.

The final effect goes a long way towards making a natural blend of highlights and shadows.

NB. Make sure you give them plenty of time to dry between stages and before you handle them, unlike me – I decided that I would immediately touch my wet Orcs head and consequently had to do the final layer again. Be ‘reyt.

2) Citadel XV-88

I use this colour as the base for all bone, teeth and nails. Additionally it’s the colour of all leather straps and cords. Be careful when you apply it as getting it over your green skin would be a bit of a shame at this stage, as you’d have to colour match to clean it it up. There’s not a lot of leather on the model so you can afford to be careful!

I like to thin this colour down slightly with a drop of Vallejo Glaze Medium to make it flow a little nicer, but not to the point where I need more than one coat.

3) Citadel Skrag Brown

I use Skrag Brown for all the leather scales. In this model, that’s just the loincloth, don’t forget to paint the back too!

Again, I thin down with Vallejo Glaze Medium as before.

4) Vallejo Model Air Steel

I don’t really like the current Citadel metallics range, I think they’re far too thin and bitty. I’ve taken to using Vallejo’s Model Air range for this now, which you can paint on with a brush just nicely.

Here I’m colouring only the parts which will be metal. No need to thin this paint down with the glaze, it’s thin enough.

5) Citadel Ushabti Bone

This is the first stage that’s a bit annoying to do in my opinion. Being super careful to avoid leather straps and green skin, you have to layer the bone colour over the teeth, nails, and bits of bone. I like to leave a bit of the brown showing towards the wide end of these materials in a nice Orkish cartoon exaggeration of real life.

Be careful how much you thin your paint here, too little and I find this paint dries rapidly on the brush, too much and and you’ll be layering coats all day.

6) Citadel Evil Sunz Scarlet

Just a tiny red dot in each of the eyes. Be super super careful, and make sure the paint is thin so it doesn’t dry on your brush before you can get to the face.

If you do slip as I did here, you can clean up with Citadel Warboss Green!

7) Vallejo Game Colour Black

For the base rim, nice and easy with thinned paint, shouldn’t cause any problems.

8) Quickshade Dip

I did a piece earlier on how I use Quickshade Dip, it’s a bit of a Marmite product to be honest, some folks swear by it, others seem absolutely disgusted by it.

I think it’s about expectation management. Quickshade Dip is not a product to use if you’re in a painting competition, but if you’re just trying to get an army on a table quickly. Hell yes. However, if you really don’t want to use dip, feel free to use a dark brown wash for a similar effect all over your miniature.

One major benefit of this stage is that it blends colours and shadows, so that dusty effect from the primer should reduce significantly here.

Right then, this seems like a good place to wrap up Part 1, since the Quickshade dip needs 24 hours to dry before I can do anything else to the mini. I’ll just set it down somewhere safe and hope the cat doesn’t brush himself up against it…

In Part 2 I’ll be covering the following:

• Anti Shine Varnish
• Basing
• Decals

Hopefully I’ll see you then!

Jimmi