Hello! Fellow orc enthusiasts! (Which I am not but hey, here we are) Its Orctober25 and I was tasked to do a post about orcs. So I decided to do four. Here is the second one. A guide for painting a black orruk with my own style and with a dramatic light. I am on a work trip so photos will be a little different from usual and painting maybe not so sharp as the 12 hour shifts of construction take their toll. At least the hotel life is sucky now that we had to change hotel and I don’t have desk any more…

We should start with a black primer and then either drybrush or airbrush our dramatic light with a white paint. With a drybrush we have to use a little bit more of our imagination. With the airbrush we can guide the light from an angle. With an drybrush we have to try to imitate that, but that we have to do with our imagination. When this stage is done, we should paint with medium grey or a lighter coat of white, the bouncing lights and environmental lights that give light to other pieces of the models.

Then we should take many pictures, from many angles to use as reference when painting. As we will be mostly painting with opaque colours, we will hide all of the layers we have done for now.

Now we will start the base coating operation. I tried out a new way to paint orc skin. Painting a weird purple base and with semi transparent layers of yellower green establish the green colour over the purple. Going more opaque with the highlights and more chartreuse trying to keep the whiter mixes only on the very spot focus of our dramatic light. We will be focusing mostly on the skin and on the armour. Its not about exact colour matches, rather value matching and not making the highlights too large.

Well block in the colours with opaque layers. After a smooth base tones we will highlight them differently depending on the chosen light angle and area. If they are in the light, they get higher than mid tone grey value highlight. But if they are in the dark, lower than mid tone grey highlight. And by lower or higher we are talking about lightness, not hue or that we use grey as a highlight.

With the skin we start going with semi transparent layers of our mid tone green of wanted skin colour. I left the deepest shadows with only one layer and places that are more in the light, get two-three layers. Then highlighting by adding white, yellow and chartreuse greens Trying to put the face in focus with very high value and chartreuse colour. Remember to go up in value with only semi opaque or semi transparent layers. This will prevent some harder transitions of value to show so badly.

With the black armour and the blade, we will start with wet blending the basic value sketch. And we will add the most prominent lights and highest values with layering when the base coat is dry. We will need to fix the wet blend a little bit. Glazing is a good way if you are not custom to wet blends. And it can be done in your own time. I try to fix most obvious mistakes while the paint is still wet, by adding the appropriate colour by the situation. Try to go by one panel at the time. Paint it ready and leave to dry. Then move on the next area. Remember that we can fix things if the wet blends don’t all succeed perfectly. We might also need two wet blends to really establish opaque layers. Depending on the paints we use of course.

Then we add our highest highs of lightness through a few layers. We need to use full opacity to achieve higher whitenesses. As the transparency kills the whiteness a little bit. I chose to stipple the highest values as its easy to control. You might find just layering easier or faster if that’s what you prefer. After the high values and corrections, we can do edge highlights and call the piece done. I did paint the eyes to add some character after this stage but main points are done.

With that we are ready. I am sorry that I forgot to take so many photos. My heat for painting took hold of me again as I was testing something very new to me. Thats all for this time. Check back next week as I am kitbashing a space ork out of one of these orruks! Its my first big level kitbash and I think I have a good idea how to handle the joining of kits together. Join Da discord and waagh on your paint competition entries for Lazy Paint Productions first ever paint competition!

(If you can see some projects in the background… Please ignore them for now…. They are a secret detail that we will be using later)