Painting: Warhammer Forces of Chaos #1

I’ve just completed five figures from Hero Quest as my first project for 2021: four Chaos Warriors and the Chaos Sorcerer. I’ve got five more Chaos Warriors started, and I think this is only the beginning of a lengthy run of Warhammer figure painting.

These five figures were fun to paint. The main reasons I’ve enjoyed doing them, and will continue are exactly why I got just past halfway through my Space Marines last year and haven’t gone back to finish them. These are all one part plastic figures with simple poses, nothing complicated but they do have interesting armour design and quite a bit of detail. While I’m going to have similar painting themes with the three different sculpts of chaos warriors, I’m still enjoying this and thinking of ways of making each have a distinctive look. (The marines, while being three chapters, were essentially fifteen identical, very simple and boring, sculpts. Maybe I can pick at them in between my warhammer fantasy painting.)

I particularly like the Chaos Sorcerer. I started out with a darker flesh/grey skin colour, that I thought was too dark, and lightened it to the very pale grey it is now. (It looks a bit whiter in pictures than it really is.) His hands are a little too big… a lot of the painted versions online have these painted as gloves, but there’s a lot of texture on both sides that I wouldn’t expect if you wore gloves. This figure is a perfect figure for any undead caster in my D&D games. The base decoration was fun too – I’d cut some skulls off the helmets of some of my other chaos warriors and one remained in good condition. I thought it would be fun to use. It sits of a pile of small broken sea-shells.

The chaos warriors got mostly gun-metal armour, with a bit of red ink to tint it, then silver edge highlights. The armour can look fairly dark, or lighter and shiny, depending on the amount of lighting.

 

Background: Hero Quest (Milton Bradley & Games Workshop) came out in 1989. I had both this and Warhammer Quest (1995), while a friend had both of these, and Advanced Hero Quest, and most of the expansions for the games. A group of us played through the initial games, and spend years on and off with Warhammer Quest. Over the years I collected a lot of figures – frequently to have them for these games and be able to use them for D&D.

 

Painting – GW Orcs finished

This took me a bit longer than planned, mostly because I got sidetracked by non-painting activities.

These are all Games Workshop/Citadel plastic figures, most of which I purchased to use with Warhammer Quest. The orc warriors are from the Hero Quest game. (Pictures can be clicked on for enlargement.)

1 black orc champion

7 orc archers

8 orc warriors – 2 with flails, 2 with cleavers and 4 with scimitars.

Like with my goblins, one of the orcs broke his sword in combat. The original sword is long-gone and the only bits I had to try and replace it with were too small. So I just trimmed it and he can hold his fist up in a threatening gesture.

I’d originally painted the orcs in flesh tones, generally darker flesh than I use for most humanoids, not green since I use most figures for D&D not Warhammer. I got sidetracked looking at different Orcs in RPGs and realised that my ideas of orc-flesh were closer to what 1st edition D&D had described, and weren’t “current” compared to recent editions. I’m not going with greyish skin, but they all did get a black ink over the top to darken their skin!

Each group is painted in almost identical fashion – the orc archers have different coloured pouches as contrast. Unlike the goblins, these guys are meant to look like a unit. While the archers have mostly yellows and greens, the warriors are mostly browns. I did use a dark fushia on nearly every figures pants (more obvious on the warriors), red for belts, and the same brown for boots. I have the same fushia and red on the champion too.

I’d previous painted a metal dark orc champion, and used the same green ink on gunmetal for the bulk of the armour to tie the two together. I’m also trying out taking photos here with a new phone. It seems to pick up the lighting better, so the images are as dark as with my previous phone (and my digital camera). Having loaded the photo, I note that I forgot to silver dry brush the champions chainmail!

EDIT: “Would you believe…” I’ve just brought all the figures in from a wonderful sunny afternoon. They have been outside drying after two coats of clear acrylic… and I found the missing orc sword! (Oh well, into the bits box.)