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Painting Ork Terrain Quickly


Humies have a sayin': home is where da art iz. Dey're right, coz if yoo don't paint yor favourite glyphs all over your home, how will anyone know it's yors?

Today's post is all about painting your own tetanus shacks for your orks, and doing it quickly. I've been using the fundaments of this technique for over 15 years, but recently iterated on it by adding a mix of rattle cans to the preparatory process for even greater speed and, I think, an improvement in quality. The result is a giant pile of old rusty metal with a few pops of colour. Harvey and I painted a full set of the Kill Team: Octarius terrain in an evening, for a total of about 6-8 man hours.


Priming

This wants to be in a dark brown. My preference is Colour Forge's Hyrax Brown.

Rattle rattle spurt spurt

Here's where you want variety, at least an orange and then a mid-brown (i.e. not too dark or light, but... mid).
  • Orange: Colour Forge's Convict Orange
  • Mid-brown: I used Citadel's old Mournfang Brown. It's tragically OOP, but TT Combat's Resistance Rust or Matt Brown would probably do.
  • Optional: I also used some of TT Combat's Laser Cut Brown for a more reddish brown, adding a bit of tonal variation, but that's fairly subtle and therefore skippable if you don't fancy blowing the budget on spray tins and couriers.
The trick here is to do little zenithal spurts of colour in random places to create tonal variation. If you can, hit individual plates of metal so that it looks like the structure's been built from disparate sources. It's fine to do some other bigger areas or fades.

It should go without saying, but don't go too crazy with the orange or you'll end up with neon terrain.

This is how it'll look when finished, and you can see the benefit of varying the initial primer.


Mmmmmmmmmmmmetal


Cover the whole thing
Give the whole thing a drybrush with a gunmetal colour. Leadbelcher would work; I used Army Painter's Gunmetal. Since this is going to go everywhere, you can save time by using a huge brush. I used a 2" brush of the sort generally used to paint actual walls. The key is to use the biggest brush you've got that's still decent for drybrushing, and at least with drybrushing you'll know if it's going streaky before it goes on the model since you're applying about 90% of the paint in your pot straight onto the palette/paper towel instead of on the finished thing. Hey, look, at least it's not quite as wasteful as sponging the paint on (some of the best techniques really do hate the planet, don't they?).

Go back over some bitz
Pick out a few individual plates and components with a heavier, more directed layer of your gunmetal colour. You can see an example of that in the image above; there's two plates that got hit with the orange spray, but one of them also got a heavy gunmetal drybrush.

Detailing

Now that you've done the messy stages, you can do the tidy ones.

Rubber
The rubber is probably the slowest, most tedious phase, but it really lifts the end result. Harvey and I went over all the cables and tires with a layer of Citadel Contrast Black Templar, which is light enough to give a rubbery kind of feel, while still being darker than all the browns.

Glyph plates & other colours
These can go whatever colour you like, according to clan preference. We used Mephiston Red, and the Army Painter's Matt White. The trick is to keep the coverage deliberately patchy, particularly on the edges - every time you avoid covering an area in paint, you're creating weathering. For an example of what I mean, look at this yellow barrel, where I've deliberately used a thin coat towards the bottom and then stippled more on towards the top, while also avoiding the banding so that it looks more battered:


You want to keep working fast and loose, don't get too drawn into details, and don't worry if things don't look perfect! With terrain it's best to look at it from arm's length rather than worrying about the detail up close.

Repeats
If you've got repeats (and if you're using the Octarius terrain, you will!) then you can help distract from that by switching up where you add your spot colours. Look at how the two identical pieces below are affected by varying the rust coverage and the glyph colours:


Easy light sources
Sometimes referred to as 'object source lighting,' this is where you simulate a light source on a miniature with paint, and for something like terrain, it's very easy:
  1. Drybrush the light colour over the affected area. We used Citadel's Yriel Yellow.
  2. Paint the light source itself (i.e. the lightbulb) white. Good coverage will take 2-3 thin coats. We used the Army Painter's Matt White.
  3. Glaze the lightbulb with a thinned down layer (think skimmed milk) of your drybrush colour, or a brighter version of it (I used Flash Gitz Yellow, which is sligthly lighter than Yriel Yellow).

Job's a good'un

And that's it! Getting a useful chunk of terrain that all the players benefit from is a great way to spend an evening, and feels enjoyably productive. Harvey and I were both insufferably chuffed, and I hope you will be too.


Comments

  1. Lovely... er rusty!

    The tip about lights is a good one, they turned out really well, and it seems to be not too difficult to achieve... That picture ALSO serves as a healthy reminder of how much detail NOT to paint, with all those rivets and gubbins you could work on just that panel for hours.

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    1. Thanks mate! It's at times like this I mentally pour one out for the guys who paint the box art, one rivet at a time. Hell no.

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  2. Dear Charlie & Harvey,

    Thanks a lot for the tutorial! it is short & sweet, and the simplified OSL tutorial "clicks" in a way that hasn´t before for me, what with the didactic photo examples.
    Your fast tutorials (plus Tom´s) have gotten me through OCctarius scenery pleasingly well, and make me enjoy painting again.

    I have some Wargames Exclusive plastic Tomb Worlds bases set for my Necrons, to do them in Tom´s style....and with your glass tutorial, for blue obsidian basing, from a common metals drybrush. I recommend them, they are gorgeous!


    I had set on a somewhat similar method based on drybrushing, but no rust.
    I do black and then drybrush warplock bronze. I love this color as a philosopher´s stone for all things metal - it lets you do colour theory for them with drybrush alone!

    It produces either a pleasingly battered iron metal if you follow with "iron warriors" and then skip to edge drybrush with an S "STC" brush in something very bright...

    Or a perfect base to all bronzes/golds.

    I only wish GW would get a native dark green & blue metals. Yes, you can wash with contrast/shades, but at that stage you better have an universal drybrushed layer that works well with both metal & non-metal.

    Scenery-wise, I have discovered wuith Octarius that, as long you drybrush metals all over, throw 1-2 layers of contrast paint over -non-metal parts and do a whites drybrush over these areas, you can get away with differentiating areas without a tedious reblocking of areas in non-metallic colours.

    Not as pretty, but it gets you enjoy painting scenery in a way normal minis don´t. It´s just SOOO liberating to never have to worry about layering - just do your detailing and lights at the drybrush stage, then only wash down, and ocasionally stipple.

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    Replies
    1. Definitely the best thing about terrain is getting to use loose, fast techniques and being rewarded with good results ☺️

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