Orctober seems to be a thing in the fantasy gaming blogosphere, so I thought I would jump, albeit a little belatedly, onto the bandwagon. I have many dozens of orcs of various types in my Lord of the Rings collection, so I thought it would be a good idea to maybe try to get some paint onto them in order to be able to use them in any upcoming games I eventually get around to.
Looking back at some old posts, I could only find one picture of the orcs in my Lord of the Rings collection (there are plenty of second hand ones I repaired and touched up for the kids a year or two back though). I have presented it here again as an aide de memoir of how many I actually have.
Not to be daunted by such a huge amount of unpainted plastic and metal, I decided to take a leaf out of my work life book and cut the job down into manageable chunks. So, I decided to start on my Mordor orcs and only work on each unique pose that comes in the box. I have a couple of boxes worth of these figures that I mainly got with the Battle Games in Middle Earth part-work magazine, plus a small number from an eBay purchase to give me around 50 or so standard orc warriors.
There are actually only ten different bodies on each sprue, but switching around a few arms leads to a few more variants. As a result, there are fourteen individuals that I will try to complete by the end of the month...
Four Mordor orcs with hand weapons and shields (no variants here)...
Four Mordor orcs with two-handed weapons (two bodies and two arm sets gives four unique variants)...
Four Mordor orcs with spears (although there are two separate spears, they are identical so give no variation)...
Two Mordor orcs with bows (no variants here)...
Looking at what others have done over the years with their orcs, I am tempted to see if I can create as many individuals as possible by mixing them up with other manufacturer's products. I would prefer all to be unique poses, but my conversion skills aren't that great. We'll see. Anyway, not to get pulled away from the core of this project, I will leave the thoughts of any new purchases until these 14 are completed at least.
Back to the photos, I must apologise for the quality. They were taken on my phone early evening on an overcast day with very little natural light. These are more to be used as place markers than anything else, and I hope to improve the quality of the photos as the project moves on.
I am aiming to get some batch painting done to start them off and then try to complete one-a-day until all are ready to be washed, varnished and based. I am off on holiday for a week soon, so taking that into account I have about 13 or 14 days in which to accomplish this - i.e. give or take one a day.
Let's give it a week until the next blog post and see where I have got to.
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