Ork Kaptain My Kaptain

Ahoy me hearties! Increasing the pirate:ninja ratio on this blog (in the proper direction once more) is a big bad Ork, Kaptain Badrukk:

This nutter is a character upgrade for Flash Gitz, a freebooter (clanless) Ork with a whacking great gun (Entirely coincidently new flash git pictures leaked this week). This job was a favour for a friend that I used as a bit of a "palette cleanser" in between Imperial agents and others. As this chap is kind of a riot of colours and features I thought I'd talk about balancing the individual elements. There is a problem - especially with models with big back banners - that attention can be drawn from the real focal element of the model. The face. This is compounded by using the sort of bright, primary colours that Orks are fond of. The dodge here is to use weathering (in this case streaking grime and rust from AK) to mute and merge the colours while leaving the face bright and clean. Speaking of the face, I think I've finally figured out the Ork skin thing, the last element I was missing was the lower lip and gums. I used to just treat these as the same as the rest of the skin but they never popped quite right. Now I'm adding Bugman's Glow to the green mix which puts a bit of mucosal flush into the gums and lips. Seems to work nicely.

The coat is also weathered with a mix of blended enamel earth and mud effects from AK. There's not much of a trick to this, its just building up layers. The strap of the gun I'm happy with, wanted it to be canvas rather than leather so I faked a bit of texture into the fabric by streaking drybrushing in a sort of cross-hatching pattern.

This detail shot shows one of my favourite bits of the model (next to the face), the map that the studio painted on the loincloth was a brilliant choice, so I did my own homage to it. Next to it is the treasure chest. A brilliant example of designers actually thinking because instead of coins its full of teeth, Orks use their teeth as currency so a rich Ork should have piles of teeth to hand. Badrukk is a very, very rich ork.

That's all for today folks, more soon!

TTFN