Sorry for yet another longer break in posting new content. But I actually have quite a nice backlog of miniatures right now, so I start by posting my attempt at Reaper’s Black Orcs from the first Bones Kickstarter.

These miniatures belong to the 30 core miniatures from the Bones plastic miniature line. They were sculpted by Tre Manor. He now sculpts nice, gritty and realistic looking figures at Red Box Games.

These are not your usual orcs, in fact they are quite large compared to human sizes miniatures and don’t fit on a 25mm base. As always, I want to use the minis in my D&D game, so I decided to place them on 40mm round bases. Altogether, there were six black orcs in the Kickstarter and I’m posting them in two seperate posts.

Let’s start with the Orc Stalker (77051), Orc Marauder (77042) sculpted by Tre Manor and one orc boss, Kavorgh (77064) by Bobby Jackson.

There are very nice paint jobs out there of all these guys. Slashhamster from the Reaper Boards gave his Orc Stalker a green skin and nice reddish armor. This is a perfect World of WarCraft look and a really great paint job. I also like the dark red skinned version from MisterSwarm. There is also a blue-skinned version for all the orcs from Auberon. Kavorgh also can be found in various different skin tones, such as green (Rich Burge, Joy Schoenberger) or brown (Warts and Weapons Studio). Only few people, like Tom Nelson, painted their orcs in black. I think this is kind of strange, as the name of the miniatures (aka ‘black orcs’) suggest a blackish skin tone, in my opinion.

Well, I decided that my orcs shall indeed have a dark skin tone. Remembering how orcs look like in DSA (The Dark Eye), orcs do look cool in black. They’re even called ‘Schwarzpelze’ (black pelts) in this fantasy setting. My orcs shall be mountain orcs. The base should have rocks and dry/yellow moutain grass on it to contrast the dark skin color, something looking like this.

Basing and Priming

The figures were cleaned first. There was no assembly required. I used 40mm round bases and glued the bones minis onto them. Later, I used putty, kitty litter, sand and small twigs and tried to create a rough mountain scenery. Next, I primed the minis black and sprayed them with white with the usual method (45 degrees from above).

Painting

I actually painted these back in May 2014, so I don’t recall the exact colors used. Note to self: Take pictures with cell phone camera while painting. For the Orc Stalker, I used white, black and chocolate brown to paint the wolf fur around his waist and mixed different orange tones to paint the fur on his back as fox fur. For the skin color, I first painted them with a mix of black and Vallejo Model Color (VMC) Dark Sea Grey and then drybrushed the edges with three different lighter shades of grey. After that, I washed the skin with Vallejo Game Color (VGC) Black Ink (dilluted 1:1 with water). The armor and weapons were painted with VGC Gunmetal Grey, washed black and later highlighted with Gunmetal Grey and VMC Silver. For Kavorgh, I mixed a blue tone for his tunic. Unfortunately, I don’t think it looks very good. I maybe should have used a warmer color.

Altogether, the relatively dark and boring colors were a reason why I didn’t post the orcs earlier. I think they turned out okay, but they could benefit from more highlights or better use of warm colors and contrasts. As I won’t be using them very often in D&D, that’s okay. My players liked them, so far 🙂

After painting them, the minis were sealed. Then, I used static grass and Army Painter moss to decorate the base in a mountain look. Here are the pics of the finished miniatures: