40K Ork Apocalypse army / Spring clean challenge / how i'm beating the boredom of the Covid 19 lock down...

Back in October 2018 when Games Workshop ran their “Orktober” promotion, I decided that huge Tyranid and Necron armies needed some company, and that my wallet hadn’t been punished enough.

So I took the plunge and ended up with around 3,000 points of Orks. I played quite a few games and added the odd unit here and there which was fine for a while… but like every project Iv’e ever started, it soon grew a mind of it’s own and I lost control.

Pretty soon I had an army which was about 10% fully finished, 30% started and about 60% un-built… Something had to change.

The Covid lockdown has given me a lot of free time to unbox, build and paint the vast pile of models that make up my Ork Army… But where to start? First stop, Battlescribe.

This useful army builder is incredibly useful not just for composing army lists, but also in creating what I refer to as paint schedules. When printing the army list, if you turn off all the details, you are left with a simple list of units separated into squads in neat little boxes.

The boxes don’t really dictate the order in which I paint any of the army, but the satisfaction that comes from writing in “Finished” next to a unit is immense and helps beat the boredom that come from painting such a large army.

At this point im going to mention Dave Taylor’s excellent book, Armies, Legions and Hordes. It’s a great guide on how to stay focused on the task when it comes to painting up an army. There are lots of suggestions about how to stay on track by setting yourself goals etc, and I have taken inspiration from the book and use my own techniques to getting an army finished.

The first step as mentioned above is to sit down with Battle Scribe and write out the Army list in full and allocating the models into their chosen units.

The next step is to break the Army down into paintable sections  You can make these as small or as large as you want and can even mix units up, but the important thing is to finish the section before you move on.

Once I choose a section to start with, I work out a format for painting the models. I choose my paint schemes and how they are applied on several criteria but essentially, they all boil down to a trade off between time taken vs finished result. If I was to say, spend an extra 5 minutes per model I might increase the quality of the paint job by say 5%…. but am I going to notice that extra 5% or would the time have been better spent on finishing more units?

To help me decide, I produce a master. I finish one or two models in a section and learn the most efficient process of applying the colours in the right order to achieve the desired effect.

A good example of this are the “Tin Eadz” detachment. A detachment comprised totally of Deff Dreads, Killa Kans, a Mega Dread and a Gorkanaut. I’ll cover how I painted them up in another post but the picture will give you an idea what i’m talking about.

The most important thing when your done painting a section is making a physical show that it is finished, something that inspires you to continue.

On my last project, I sorted my Team Yankee models into three basic categories, Unbuilt, base coated and finished. And divided each category up with masking tape. This gave me a physical goal line that units could cross as they moved from category to category. This small thing actually gave me huge inspiration to keep progressing and getting units over the finish line.

Because my Ork army is so large, it’s not very practical to use a set up like the one I used for TY. Instead, I write finished in the boxes my Battle Scribe list and tick them off as I go. Its this small achievement that gives me the encouragement I need to keep going.

Thanks for reading, next post I will talk about my Tin Eadz detachment in more detail, and show how using simple techniques, they were busted out pretty quickly.