I completed the scratchbuilds and conversion I started back in https://www.apostatemakes.net/2024/02/11/scratch-building-gretchin-pistols-wip/.
Once I had all the guns build and glued into place- and a few broken off, and glued into place, and broken off, and pinned with superglue because the plastic I was using for some bodies did NOT get along with CA- I got to painting. Zenithal followed by green ink which was lovely but needed way more thinning down than I did, which got rid of most of the effect of the zenithal. I know for next time. A couple coats of black and brown for their shirts, and then for the first time I tried stippling highlights. It was partly because highlighting black is kind of a pain in the dick but the guide I found suggested it, and partly because I didn’t want to carefully layer highlights on 20 popcorn mob gretchin like I’ve learned to do with my one-off hero/monster TTRPG models.
Anyway, it took a couple of tries to figure out what colours to use for the highlights but once I got it dialed in it went real speedy. I need to push more contrast in general (the consistent plight of the inexpert mini painted), but I got enough to look okay at 12 inches.
And THEN I sat and stared at the Deathskull livery for two days and frowned, because while I play OPR exclusively right now and expect to never play in a 40k tournament (because lol, and also I don’t have the plastic a lot of shops require), I’m happy to theme my “legally distinct from” models in a way that pleases the lore/fandom of the larger game, you know? Which is an issue because orks are green and my “junk builder” aesthetic leans heavily into Deathskull themes, which means dark blue, and that makes for a difficult colour triad. Either I lean all the way in to an analagous triad and accent with a pale blue-green, which makes my orks a little more oceanic than I want, or I have to cross the colour wheel and now I’m looking at either a tetrad of red and yellow (which fuck that is too much work) or a split complimentary on red-orange.
At which point it occurred to me that nearly everything I was planning to run besides gretchin were vehicles, and I love painting and weathering yellows and oranges. So I’m sold!
And then I realized “lucky car thieves everyone hates that wear blue body paint” is a hopefully accidental English caricature of the Irish by an English company who themed their orks after Yorkshire pub brawlers, oh dear.
So anyway, I started painting. The gretchin became practice models for trying out some woad-style patterns and it worked pretty good. I stole someone else’s idea of sponging green back on top to make it look like flaking body paint that anyone who goes to ren faires or LARPs or such things will be intimately familiar with. Impossible to see in these pictures ’cause I don’t have a DSLR or photo booth and I’ll be damned if I add another hobby just to look good on the internet. But I’m happy with them in person! Conversion from WH Fantasy goblins I bought cheap to practice painting on into 40k gretchin proxies for OPR complete!
I’m going to go back and base them later, probably a yellow texture paint with a homemade red contrast/wash to get that red-orange. But they’re done and magnetized for carrying and playable and I probably won’t curse them when a gun pops off mid play! 😀
