JiiPee Korpela

First of all, it is my first ViC entry and therefore I would like to thank both Dominic and FanPro for the opportunity to paint this beautiful figure, that would have been unreachable to me without this sponsorship.

Step 1: Trying to fit pieces together.

Then I tried to fit the spear. No luck. (And no, it was not upside down!) Then I tried to bend the upper hand very carefully and – snap! The joint broke. Well, nothing some superglue and green stuff could not fix… Had some trouble aligning the horns properly too, and I still think they are way too big for him… but that´s just my opinion…

Because it was nearly Christmas, I decided to do a snow scheme. The one thing I didn´t like in this mini was the cape. Though nicely sculpt and detailed, it just seemed to need some furlining. I sculpted that with green stuff and primed everything black (partly because I wanted to create a dark, evil ork – but mostly because "The members of the Black Primer Cult" do so…). BTW, when I use black undercoat, I always very gently drybrush the whole figure first in dark grey (GW Fortress Gray) to see the details. It helps me to see where everything is and it does not show in the finished figure at all.

Then just before Christmas Dominic showed his ViC to us in advance. Great. Furlining and everything. Back to my drawing board… Took off furlining. Decided to paint it without any conversions at all, to show what a beautiful miniature this is.

Step 2: Painting.

The painting itself was a challenge. I tried for the first time a new technique to make the armour look like metal without actual metal paints. And this ork really had some armour plates!

Since the figure was named "Ork Warlord" I wanted to make this ork look just that, yet not to overdo a "noble" look. I decided to paint him using only different shades of brown and some shiny red on the cape and gems and such.

Started with the face. All basecoated in black (black, black…) I painted thin, multiple layers of GW ‘Dark Flesh’ to the face then highlighted it with ‘Snakebite Leather’.

The armour in the chest was made with the same colours with a little ‘Golden Yellow’ added to them.

Horns and teeth had their share of ‘Skull White’ and old trustful ‘Snakebite Leather’ blended together when still wet – in several applications though.

(In fact I very often use both blending and layering together in same spot to achieve the best results.)

Several thin coats of ‘Codex Grey’ was then added to "armoured parts" and layered trough ‘Fortress Grey’ all the way to careful ‘Skull White’ to maximum highlight. Inside of the cape was then painted with ‘Blood Red’, shaded with black and finally a very light touch of ‘Golden Yellow’.

Outside of the cape was painted ‘Chaos Black’ with some ‘Enchanted Blue’ as highlight (Barely visible in picture, but that´s what I was looking for in the first place). Didn´t want to paint any runes or the like on it, because I will surely use this mini in gaming purposes (some day), and my orks don´t like magic thingies attached to them :)

Skulls are ‘Rotting Flesh’ washed with ‘Flesh Wash’ for earthy look, then roughly highlighted with ‘Skull White’.

Although I liked the Non-Metallic-Metallic effect on this figure, I found out that others (who don´t paint miniatures) didn´t see the "metallic" in gray paint. Comments varied from "Umm… so this grey is supposed to be metal?" to "Have you run out of that nice shiny paint you used to have?". Hmm… When I had enough of these comments I tried to give the metallic parts a very diluted wash of ‘Mithril Silver’ or Gamecraft’s ‘Copper’ (I love this colour). Now the shades and highlights that were painted are still visible, but the main effect was very "metallic". I like it. A lot.

One could call this NMMWM (Non-Metallic-Metallic-With-Metallic)?

That´s about it. Hope you could see it in real life, because as always it looks sooo much better in real life ;-)

JiiPee Korpela