Death Skull Ork

After seeing Sebastian's GD winning ork I was inspired to give an Ork a go. I had to make mine different from Seb's one though, as not to tread on toes. I also wanted to include bionics, but to have them looking like they would work in real life. This is something that I see a lot of modelers do, not thinking about it too much. Sure it looks good painted, but would never work in application. I decided that my death skull ork would have stepped on a mine, or a frag grenade, which had gone off close to the left side of the body.

The arm and leg removed, new ones were scratch built out of plastic card, tubes, wire and guitar cable. For reference Terminator 2 the film was used. I also wanted a weapon for the foot. I used the head of the Pitch fork from the Giant sprue. Next was to make it functional. I added hydraulics and a power source (back-pack). I placed the hydraulic rams/pistons where up/down movements were needed. The joints were all able to move in the construction stage, but were glued when the rams/pistons were in place. His buzzsaw was also made to look detachable, through a coupling joint. I also swapped the head for Grimgor Ironhide's. It also fitted the look well with a damaged left eye.

The Base

I had a few different ideas with the base. I really wanted to have him dodging bullets but having not constructed him with the centre of gravity to show him moving but still balanced, some angles looked wrong. So it was left to be standing upright. I did manage to get him looking a little twisted though. I needed a slightly more flat surface for him to balance on, and after having so much fun with bark, I thought I would construct the base with it.

I wanted a multi-level looking base. I built the base with some poor soul crushed under a slab of rock, but it was a very long time ago. I wanted to have a go at painting the helmet from Cyril's site. Earth tone pastels (soft pastel chalks) were also used to add different hues of colour around the base.

Painting

Just about everything on this model was my first attempt at doing. The helmet was following Cyril's instructions. I also went into the painting process with the attitude of nothing but the best. I also worked on smaller areas at one time. I used a wet pallet and started with a white undercoat, that was black washed. All paints HEAVILY DILLUTED!!!!

I started with the face and skin. Base: 891 Intermediate Green + 899 Dark Prussian Blue. Deepening the shadows until pure 899. Cleaned up the base colour. Started to highlight by adding GW Rotting Flesh to the base colour until pure Rotting flesh. The mouth is painted black. Teeth are painted with 916 sand yellow to 951 pure white. The scare is painted with very thin juices of 945 Magenta, a pink I made up like 958 pink and GW blood red. The blue was painted the same way with 930 Darkblue and adding 951 white.

The leather was painted with a wash of 985 Hull Red then cleaned up with 982 Cavalry Brown. Highlighting started with adding 981 Orange Brown and then adding GW Rotting Flesh, till pure RF. The RED and BLUE juices were added to the leather clothing as well.

Blue metal plates were painted from 930 dark blue + 899 Dark Prussian Blue, cleaned with 930 Dark Blue, highlighted with 930 Dark Blue + 951 White. The Chips were painted by painting dark patches with 822 German Cam Black Brown, then painting GW Boltgun inside the 822. Rust colour was painted over the Boltgun to flatten it then GW Mithril Silver to pick out Highlights. Then the lighter blue was painted on the edges to create a raised look to the painted surface. The same process was done to all the chipped areas then the corresponding colour painted around the chips. Metal parts were painted 950 Black then GW Boltgun + 950 Black. Then adding more Boltgun till pure Boltgun, and adding Mithril Silver to reduce the area of painting to the tops only where most of the light would fall, up to pure Mithril Silver. I started to deepen the colour by adding Rust like colours (GW snakebite Leather, Bestial Brown, Scorched Earth, Black) as well as blues, purples and greens. All very subtle though. Re-highlighting with Boltgun up to Mithril Silver. Yellow parts were painted using Allan C's tutorial on painting yellow and paint chips on www.creafigs.com

The OSL (green on source light), again followed the tutorial on http://neomodel.free.fr The checkered pattern was painted carefully with diluted paints in the appropriate colour and then worked up in highlights where light would fall. I started out by drawing the pattern on paper first to get the right look and balance. This was then mapped out with a dark grey and cleaned up with the appropriate base colour around the edges, to make sure everything is square. Then the checkers are filled in with dark grey and highlighted to white. The blue checkers were painted with the same blue as the blue metal parts.

Guild Artisan,
Mark.