Midgard : LotR (Orcs with shields 1)

These next four orc warriors painted up quite quickly using my 20-30 minutes per day schedule. I must admit though, when the light is low I have had to skip a day's painting and make it up later.

These are all in the same colour scheme as the previous two sets as I want to keep the first fourteen looking like a cohesive whole. The next fourteen, the converted ones, will have a slightly different scheme for their cloth parts to differentiate them and individualise them further. I want every orc to at least appear different even if that is just a different paint job or easy weapon swap conversion.

Orcs with hand weapons and shields

The warband is coming along quite nicely now - I have completed 9 of the initial 14 figures. When they're all painted I will do a group shot or two before getting on with the second batch of fourteen.

Next up should be the final five orcs of this batch - the ones wielding polearms.

During the down days, due to the lack of light, I have been progressing with other hobby work on the army. The initial nine variants of Warlord Games' figures have been constructed (another post on those soon), some movement trays have been sorted and construction on them has started (also another post), plus I have managed to look in the rulebook at the Midgard army Zagrot the Cruel's Orc Warband. This is a very basic 300pt warband that literally has a few leaders, a unit of trolls, 8 units of orc (heavy infantry) warriors, a unit of wolf-riders, and two units of archers. The 400pt army just has a few extra units of each orc warrior type. Looking at the pictures in the rule book and on several blogs and forums, it seems people just lump all their different orcs onto the bases without a care for weapon-types etc. Sooo, I think I will stop worrying about diligently adding orcs into similarly armed units and just plonk them all together in massed infantry units. This "official" way of sorting orcs will hopefully stop my mild OCD from kicking in too much whilst I worry about the differentiations and permutations of what is a spear and what is a polearm etc. Orcs should be, well, orcs - non-drilled but competent warriors.