Orc Repaints

During the course of the two battles a couple of weeks ago my youngest son commented on the broken miniatures in his orc collection. I mentioned that they were OK for now and allowed us to play our games, but I could see that he wanted me to fix them up for him.

All of his Lord of the Rings minitaures were bought second-hand from eBay and are certainly in need of a spruce up. After he had sorted out the orcs for our next game (hopefully due this weekend) I noticed that he had three that were actually broken and the rest really need some painting TLC.

I took a look at trying to fix the three broken orcs; two archers with the tops of their bows broken and a spearman (spearorc?) with a missing arm! I managed to find the top of one of the bows but I am not sure how to progress with the other two at the moment - my bits box may contain some parts I can scavenge.

Anyway, as the light has been improving with the coming of spring, I also decided to take it upon myself to re-do the bases of all of his orcs to at least get them to look like a coherent unit. I matched one of the basing techniques that seemed to look the best, and got all sixteen (including the three broken ones) to the same level of neatness.

Unfortunately, in my mind, this would not do and I began to look at the poor paintjobs. They were not the best in world, so I decided to begin tidying them up too. I wasn't going to do a full re-paint on them, so just stuck with getting the disparate sets of figures into a single, coherent look.

I managed to finish six of them today and will complete the rest next week. They don't look too bad considering they are just a basic block colouring in to cover up where the previous owners had "gone over the lines". I didn't do a full fix on them, so there are still lots of the original "wrong" bits, and I won't be shading or highlighting them, nor will I be varnishing them, but I may put a little bit more effort into the bases. I think littlun will be pleased with these...

The shields were also a bit of a mess, so I just shaded them a very dark grey and free hand painted an Eye of Sauron on two of them. It was a one-time attempt with no touching up - hopefully I have emulated what an orc paint job would be well enough.

I am not a great fan of green orcs, but as some were painted a kind of green and some a kind of dark red, I just went over them roughly with a similar colour.

I daresay he will ask me to do this for each of his small armies (he has about 120 or so second hand figures). It will keep me out of mischief at least until I can summon the muse to get on with my own lead and plastic miniature mountains.