Retro 40k Duck Style

I recently watched a cool cross-over video by ZorpaZorpand GeekGaming where they went back and revisited their ‘dream armies’ from their youths. This got me thinking and when a very old friend of mine posted pictures of his 2nd edition Eldar taking shape I thought “Why not give it a go myself, how hard can it be”?

So a trip up to the ‘loft of opportunity’ yielded a pile of my old Orks. These were the first army I ever collected and helped develop my love of wargaming. I love the idea of these battle crazy loons hurtling into battle and I love the 2nd edition Ork ‘Cultcha’ with their tiered society and clanz. The loft as always yielded an opportunity, which upon further examination looked a bit like this:

This being a second edition challenge I thought it best to start with the old plastics that came in the 2nd edition boxed set. Luckily most of these seem to have survived their 27 year wait quite well I have however lost quite a few Ork Boy arms.

Deciding to just take the bull by the horns (Goff pun), I charged straight in with the first 20 Gobbos/Gretchin. The thought of 20 identical static mono-pose Gobbos did not (surprisingly) fill me with Dredd. I always base my models with adhesive magnetic material for ease of transport and after cleaning up the mold lines, I decided to go with a classic green sand base, no rocks, not grass, just good, old fashioned sand painted green. That was how we rolled in the early 90’s.

Next up was priming and I went with a grey primer (Halfords) with a zenith of white sprayed directly from above. I had a bit of a challenge with the skin as it has been a long time since I painted Orks, but I wanted the skin tones to get progressively lighter as the Orks get smaller from Nobz being darker skinned down to light snotlings. So my Gretchin needed to be quite bright. I went with the following combo:

So here you can see the steps, the first highlight is using just the warboss green and the final is using just the moot green. The good thing about hte Citadel Layer paints used in this example is that they have a good level of transparency. I thin them a bit with water to increase this and was really happy with the result. It’s quick and good for the level of quality I want to achieve, given that I have 40 of these guys to paint.