Painting Report: Ogryn 1996

Van Burren here,

My first time on this blog with a Painting Report!

First, let me start with giving a bit of background on me & painting:

I started painting miniatures back in 1996. That was when I got me a shiny box of second edition WH 40k and botched all the marine miniatures with a silver spray ... Having ruined all of the marines I only had the orks left, which I then started collecting and painting.

Due to life's unforeseen circumstances... and lack of a gamer group in my new town, I stopped painting in 1999. That was a sad time in my life....

In March 2009 when I got me a shiny box of 5th edition WH 40K and relived beautiful memories from my childhood, with the exception of raping my space marines with wall paint. And so I painted some more orks with a strong feeling of deja vu.

Apart from miniature painting I have doubled in digital art, REAL painting, lots of sketch work, murals, sculpting and all sorts of artsy stuff since I was ... hmmm I don't recall ever not doing any of that. I you could say I have a fairly strong background when it comes to paint. Also, I would like to mention I'm addicted to coolminiornot.

I do hope this is not going to be the last report of this kind... and I promise not to rant on the next one.

Anyyyyywayyyyyss, back to business.

Today I'm going to be painting (in a figurative sense) an Ogryn bone 'ead called Stefa, from 2nd edition (whom I managed to retrieve from the time-warp he was sitting in since 1999).

Those Ogryns were a bit different from the modern day ones. They had a bit more of an edge to them and less of a I-m-too-dumb-to-wipe-my-own-arse look on their faces.

Since he was already painted by me back in 1996 (... doesn't that sounds like a quote from "Back to the Future 3"?) I decided to simply enhance that paint job. So here is the first pic showing the ogryn with a new coat of paint.

I wish I had made a photo of him before I started painting, so you will have to use your imagination or x-ray vision to see what he looked like before.

The colors I used there were dwarf flesh, german cammo green, chaos black(weapon). All the remaining paint was there before.

First I started off with the gun using a technique I use from most inorganic objects. I added highlights with about 1/2 black 1/2 Enchanted Blue, then added edge highlights with 3/4 khaki 1/4 black, then added pure khaki extreme highlights, and some very extreme pure white highlights. This is not very fine blending and to tie the colors together I washed it with badab black ink. After it dried I redid some of the extreme highlights with a watered down white.
I do not like to spend a lot of time on guns and other menial equipment as I find it that it requires a lot of concentration to make blending on them look very good and for me it is not interesting enough to do spend time on it. The technique I used here did not take more than a few minutes and the result is satisfactory for anything other then competition entry or collector piece.

Next up I did the metallics on the gun. I undercoated it all with boltgun metal and then applied highlights with mithril silver, washed with badab black, and redid some mithril highlights. Sometimes I use a mix of white and mithril silver to do extreme edge highlights. Also notice that I painted the shells. Since I do not have a brass colored paint I based them with burnished gold, then washed with badab black and gryphon sepia, and at the end dry brushed some mythril silver.
This is my favorite part, painting the skin. I really enjoy painting the organic bits such as skin and fur as a more free and imprecise way of painting, such as mine, works to the benefit of such surfaces as they are never perfect in nature. The first thing I did was to gradually paint from dwarf flesh to white (off-white is an even better choice). I did this by putting a bit of white right next to dwarf flesh on the palette and mixing them in between, gradually adding more white to the mix. I usually do this by eye, but what I end up doing in the end, is painting around three to four progressive levels till I arrive to near-white.
Ok, we finished doing the gradient.... but it certainly does not look like skin! Oh, wait my friends, do not throw the first stone! We are only behind the first and least inventive step. What we need to do now is to add character. I've done this by adding things like a red nose (diluted blood red), swelling around the band-aid, eyes!, drybrushed hair, and redness on stressed joints using diluted red gore.
Now we are getting somewhere! Notice on that last picture that I also painted the combat blade. I used the same technique as the metal on the gun, and after that added weathering to both by washing them with a mix of strongly watered down tin bitz and dark flesh. Also, I added some dried blood smearing to the knife using a loose brush with only a little diluted red gore, it is better visible on the next pic.

As the flesh still looks way to fresh and baby like, I added a wash of very watered flesh-sepia-black to the whole skin area, making sure that the paint does not pool.
The clothing and leather were painted in a similar way to the gun. 1. Do three stages of highlights, 2. Wash with base color, 3. Re-do extreme highlights. For leather I used a bit more extreme highlight as leather tends to reflect light much better. I added another highlight to the skin mixing gloss varnish, white, and dwarf flesh to reinforce the highlights and add it a lively feel.
The 98% finished model looks like this:And here are the pics of his buddies:

Allright, that's it for now! May the emperor protect.