I haven’t posted for a while because pretty much all I’ve been doing is assembling Orcs and Goblins, basing them and priming them. So here they are:

- The Orc General on foot, assembled from the $40nz Orc Warboss plastic boxed set. To be honest I found this set to be a disappointment. The parts aren’t that interesting, nor that well sculpted. The giant boar in particular was very bland and lacked the surface detail I’d expect. Guess I should have gone with a metal figure for the General. His base is detailed with some spare Zombie heads.

- 24 multi-part Orc Warriors with spears and shields, assembled from a Regiment box mixed with spares I had from other sets. You can probably spot a few Chariot Orc heads in there and a chariot shield, and the Hero is armed with the spare great weapon I had from the Warboss – I’ll just call that a large spear. I’ve got six more to put together to finish the 30 Orc unit.

- 20 of the newer vanilla Night Goblins which are -tiny- compared to their older figures and are another disappointing new plastic set. They’re so small compared to the older Goblins they look like a regiment of Gobbo kids out for a playful afternoon of stabbing small woodland creatures with their sharp sticks.

- Behind the Gobbos there are 15 Zombies. These guys have been assembled for something like four years now, so I dusted them off and finally primed them.

- Finally at the back there’s half of the 10 Orc Archers I’ve assembled, the other five are being painted. I’ve got another 10 to assemble for two small units of Orc Arrer Boyz.

I probably shouldn’t have assembled and primed all this lot at once, because looking at them ranked up like this is kind of daunting to a part time gamer like myself. Even painting them using dipping techniques will be a reasonable amount of work.

I’ve also spent a fair amount of time patching my Games Workshop plastic Giant. It’s a nice figure, but it’s got a heck of a lot of large seams to patch because of it’s huge, hollow multi-part assembly. As I’ve also elected to put together all his weapon options I’ve got to patch them too, since many of them also have very prominent seams. Patching is tedious work, but it’s worth it in the end when you’ve got no obvious seams on the painted figure.

I’m still assembling and painting Orcs, and have enough of them now that I’m sick of shuffling them around a game table manually. Instead of buying a set of GW movement trays and cutting them to size for the larger bases that Orcs use, I dusted off some old Evergreen plasticard sheet I’ve had laying around in the garage. I originally bought it for basing DBA units, which doesn’t take a heck of a lot of plasticard since they’re 15mm troops.

The base of the tray is 2mm white plasticard cut to hold a 6 x 5 ranking of Orcs. The tray edging is 1mm plasticard cut into a 1mm long strip and super-glued in place. Thin styrene cut into narrow strips like this tends to curl a reasonable amount so be prepared to carefully bend it back into a straight line. Look at the larger photo and you may notice some slight wavering along the edges because frankly I wasn’t that careful. A single sheet of styrene built two 6 x 5 Orc sized movement trays, with enough left over to make a small cavalry movement tray for 6 x Goblin Dire Wolf riders.

I’ll wash the trays in dish-washing detergent to clean them, then prime them with a cheap black spray can and matt varnish them lightly to get a nice flat black that will blend into the Orc bases. After all on the game table, nobody will be paying any attention to your movement trays.

The photo also shows I’m about 40% of the way through assembling the second unit of Orc spear + shield warriors. Multi-part regiment boxes take a lot longer to assemble than two part Battalion boxes – that’s for sure.

I’ve been assembling the Games Workshop plastic Giant I purchased recently and while admiring all the head and weapon options you have in the box I thought why should I have to pick just one? Fortunately I still have around 80 rare earth magnets left from my purchase from Aussie Magnets several years ago.

So I busted out my 1mm, 2mm and 3mm drill bits and started to drill a bunch of holes in the giant. As the figure is well, giant in 28mm scale, there was ample room to sink 3mm diameter by 2mm deep magnets into the limbs and hand choices. The first shot shows how I’ve placed the magnets on the main figure, after that it was just a matter of drilling out each and every hand and weapon option I wanted to use – which turned out to be all of them of course.

To place the magnets appropriately I used my own Blu Tack pinning method. Also If you’re wondering why I’m using three drill bits when one would suffice, it’s because I find sinking a guide hole and then drilling that out slowly to the right size gives you much more control than just slapping the 3mm bit against the plastic and hoping for the best. Control is particularly important when you’re drilling narrow pieces, or potentially drilling close to the surface of the sculpted plastic.

The hands turned out so well I magnetised the heads too. This required some careful drilling as the magnets were placed in the top of the skull as it’s the widest point of contact on the figure’s neck. The plastic does get thin up there though and I ended up leaving the magnets protruding about 0.5 mm out of the skull interior, rather than risk through drilling, resulting in tedious patching work. You can clearly see this in the photo. I drilled out all of the heads except the Chaos one, because frankly I think the horns look a little dopey – and I don’t play a Chaos force anyway.

Once the drilling and gluing was finished, I spent an amusing half an hour with my six year old son in the garage trying head and arm swaps. He liked the way you could pop the ‘enslaved giant’ collar on with the millstone, and then snap a number of different heads on over it, and also the way you could attach hands and then swivel them into different poses.

The rare earth magnets are easily strong enough to hold the head and smaller ‘free’ hands on during play. The weapon hands all stay in place fairly robustly except the large Orcish ‘dragon’s head’ club (see photo) which is really just too top heavy. It doesn’t detach from the figure, but will swivel downwards pretty easily. During play I suspect a little blu tack in the join will help stop that.

Now I just have to patch, prime and paint the beastie!

I haven’t posted for a while, because I’ve been slowly assembling the various bits and pieces from my Imperial Games Warhammer order, and while I enjoy making GW plastic figures, it doesn’t make for very interesting blogging. To date I’ve built most of a Warhammer Giant, a box of 20 Night Goblins, three Fanatics, an Orc Boss and around 20 Orc Arrer boyz (from my original battalion boxes). I’ve also cleaned up and reprimed a bunch of stuff too – 20 Zombies are ready for painting, which would take the me up to 40 in total. I’ve also got the final five Orc Boyz primed too which would take my first Orc unit to 30, and I’m half way through painting the second Boar Chariot.

Anyway, while assembling the plastic Goblin Fanatics I was disappointed by the bland look of the straight chains their balls of whirling death are on. It doesn’t really match the fluff, so I thought I’d try heat bending the thermoplastic GW figures are molded from. Searching on the internet it seems people use all sorts of methods to reshape GW plastics. I didn’t fancy hair driers, heat guns or open flames so resorted to boiling water. Bringing a pot to the boil on the stove I held the Fanatics in for a minute using cooking chopsticks. The plastic chains became easily bendable so I put gentle curves into all of them, although I wonder if I shouldn’t have gone more extreme and tried for a spiral or u-bend?

It was so easy I wonder why I haven’t tried this years ago with other GW plastics. I discovered something else too – GW black plastic bases are made of an awful cheap and crappy thermoplastic. I made the mistake of leaving the round bases on the Fanatics while I was boiling them and the bases shrunk and warped considerably in the process. Oh well, I’ve got plenty of square bases to spare so just replaced them, since basing makes no difference as they move randomly with scatter dice.

I’ve dipped another ten Zombies since I mixed my own green dip and I’ve added in the five Zombies I painted slowly years ago to create this small unit. Can you spot the hand painted vs the dipped Zombies? It’s not that hard to do, but I’m happy to see they blend in nicely with the newer dipped figures, which really goes to show the strength of the dipping technique. Individually the figures aren’t that great, but overall the unit looks quite nicely foetid which is exactly the effect I was hoping green dip would have.

The custom movement tray is just a standard GW movement try that’s had some resin cast details from a Hirst Arts mold pinned to it and painted. It looks quite nice but frankly can be a bit of a hassle to place figures into as they tend to snag on the details. Looking at it again, I wonder if I shouldn’t brush a little dip on that bronze as well.

I’ve got a bunch more Zombies taking a stripping bath at the moment to remove some incomplete paint jobs, and I’ve got another handful to patch up and prime. In fact I’m considering salvaging my original Vampire Counts Border Patrol Force from 2004 and getting them finally finished using dip. To complete them wouldn’t take much effort once the Zombies are done. From memory I think I had a handful of metal Grave Guard to finish as well, and they can certainly go through the green dip. In fact I might try a little highlighting over the base coat prior to dipping, rather than the simple flat base colours I’ve been doing so far.

For reference here’s close-ups of the two extra ranks of five Zombies I’ve painted. You can see I’ve been experimenting with a variety of skin tones, from a lighter green to a lighter turqouise to a slightly over the top dark turqouise tone. Dip gives your figures quite a natural range of tones even if you base them with the same colour (thinned GW Camo Green in this case) but I thought I’d mix it up a little and see how it works. The blue skin tones came out fairly well, giving the figures a drowned or maybe frostbitten appearance. I wanted to experiment with some purple skin tones as well, but couldn’t find any purple paint in my collection – and frankly couldn’t be bothered mixing a custom tone for a couple of figures. Ah well, maybe a few in the next batch!

Now I’ve painted my Orc Border Patrol force, I’m looking to expand it to a full Orc and Goblin army. I was steeling myself to pay full retail prices, until Daniel pointed out Imperial Games sell Games Workshop below retail in New Zealand. To my knowledge that makes them the only discount Games Workshop retailer in New Zealand. They carry the entire Games Workshop range, not to mention several other superb independent companies like Pig Iron, CNC Workshop and Ziterdes (excellent for terrain) and if you order more than $75nz worth of goods they’ll ship for free within the country. I had a few questions about my order so emailed them and was pleasantly surprised to find Imperial Games are also run by professional and responsive folks, which is exactly what you want from an online retailer.

I’ve ordered the following from them to bulk out my Orc’n'Gobbo force. I’ve put the GW NZ retail price in italics for comparsion:

$49.50 ($55) Night Goblins Regiment
$22.50 ($25) Night Goblin Fanatic Box
$49.50 ($55) Orc Warriors Regiment
$36.00 ($40) Orc Warboss
$67.50 ($75) Warhammer Giant
$225.00 ($250) Total

That’s a 10% discount on GW retail and free shipping. I’ll be using Imperial Games from now on for most of my hobby purchases, particuarly since they carry several other lines I’ve mentioned in the past and the Ziterdes range includes lots of useful terrain.

I also have no problem recommending them to any gamer based in New Zealand. It’s fantastic to finally have a professional, discount Games Workshop web-store based here in New Zealand.

As dipping Orcs in off the shelf pre-stained wood varnish worked so well I thought I’d try some different coloured dip. Unfortunately Wattyl don’t make a green all-in-one varnish product so following Dustan’s advice again, I mixed my own. I picked up some Tamiya X-25 ‘Clear Green’ enamel paint from a local hobby store, a pot of clear satin floor varnish from the hardware store and combined them with a little ‘ebony’ oil based stain in an old, clean mint-jelly jar (which seemed appropriate). The dip was made by pouring two thirds of the Tamiya X-25 in and then slowly adding the satin floor varnish until I had a tone I was happy with, then I darkened the dip down by slowly adding small amounts of the ebony wood stain. Essentially I was trying to match the depth of colour of the wood stain product I used on the Orcs.

I dusted off some of the fifty assembled but unpainted Zombies I made for my Vampire Counts force, base coated them and dipped them into the new, minty green dip. Here’s the first four, matt varnished and ready to shamble. I’m not entirely satisfied with the results though, they’re passable for a gaming paint job but I think they’re not as successful as the dipped Orcs.

The green dip works well over the Games Workshop Camo Green that was used as the basic flesh tone, but don’t think it works that well over the brown tones on the figures. This is unfortunate because it’s earthy tones I typically paint with, which is obviously if you look at the Orcs I’ve been dipping, or any of my Pulp figures from the past. Ah well, perhaps it’s time to expand my repertoire and the green dip certainly works over whites like Skull White primer, off-whites like Bleached Bone, Rotting Flesh and yellows and yellow-browns like Khommando Khaki and Bubonic Brown. I’m also very happy with the way it’s worked on the Boltgun Metal chest plate and suspect it’ll go quite nicely over Shining Gold as well.

So I think I’ll forge ahead regardless of my reservations. I’ve tidied up half of my 50 Zombies ready for base coating and dipping so I might as well keep painting. It’s been suggested that I try varying the skin tone a little and I do wonder how the green dip would go over light blue or even purple tinged flesh. I suspect you could probably end up with some quite delightfully fetid looking Zombies… (cue rolling thunder, lightning flash).