In 2014, I painted the Orcs from Reaper Bones’ first Kickstarter. In 2016, I got more Orcs from the Reaper Bones II Kickstarter. I was not perfectly happy with the first batch of orcs, especially the black skin color and the 40 mm bases I used for them. The arrival of the new orcs gave me enough reason to take the older miniatures apart and paint all of them again.

The Reaper Bones Orcs from the first Bones Kickstarter were one of my first miniatures painted on this blog. I liked them, but after using them on the gaming table, I had several issues with them: The bases were too large (I used 40 mm bases then) and the black skin resulted in very dark overall colors and too little contrast.

Once my share of the Reaper Bones II Kickstarter arrived, I knew that I have to paint all the orcs roughly in the same way. They should be used together on the battlefield after all.

In Dungeons and Dragons, orcs don’t have green skin like in Warhammer or WarCraft. Instead, they have a gray-brown skin. The old version of my orcs had dark, nearly black skin. There are illustrations of wild orcs with darker skin, and because of that, I chose to paint them this way back then.

However, as I was painting more of them, I wanted to change the skin color for a better overall contrast and better fit in into the D&D lore.

Basing and Priming

First, I removed the old bases from the previously painted orcs. This time, I used 30 mm bases instead of 40 mm for both the old and the new orcs. 40 mm did not work very well with my battle maps, but 30 mm is good enough. 25 mm (1-inch) would be perfect, but the orcs were too large for this base size.

As usual, I primed the miniatures by airbrushing them in black and white. Sorry though, I didn’t take any pictures after priming the new orcs.

Painting

The base coat for the skin color is stone gray instead of anthracite. The skin tone is a cold gray instead of warmer colors, so they contrast better with the warmer colors of the equipment. I think this works way better now. Because the orcs should look like a unit, they would share the basic color themes for leathers, furs, and cloth.

There were a lot of orc miniatures, and I guess I ran out of patience while painting all of them. You can see evidence of that in the pictures below, which show more sloppy and faster paint jobs than usual for me.

However, I am happy with how all the orcs turned out! Now, they fit better on the gaming table, too!

I actually don’t remember, why I chose to paint the demon wings in brown colors instead of reds. If I painted another one of these today, I would probably paint the wings in black and red. To make both succubi distinct, I varied the armor color and the hair color.

Below, you can see a direct comparison of the old and new paint job on the Orc Berserker:

And here they are!