Long time no see!  It’s been a while since I finished anything, so it’s good to be back with another update.  Once again I’ve finished another mob for my Ork Freebooter army.  I’ve now got 5 Freebooter mobs and a big mob, so I really should paint a warboss and retinue so as to have a complete game-legal army ready to play with.

This bunch took me longer than I expected, not least because I did it properly.  Having decided to paint some Stormboyz and picked the minis, I then chose the weapons load-out.  Giving them all bolt-pistols and hand weapons seemed a no-brainer, after all they were going to be assault troops.  Curiously, you still need to take a boy with a heavy weapon, even when using jump packs, so I gave mine an heavy plasma gun because it seemed like the coolest Orkiest thing to do.  Heavy plasma gun and jump-pack!  You can see below how I modelled it.  Then I gave the nob a roll on the assault weapons chart and got a power glove.  Rolled for some stikkbomz, because the nob had one modelled onto him.  Then I rolled for chaos rewards.  D4 + 1… 5 gifts!  I went to Slaves To Darkness and rolled 5 times on the rewards charts.  This is what I got: bestial face – flesh hound / dog; a pack of chaos hounds; gift of the gods – weapon hand; eye of the gods – chaos weapon (singing) + collar of khorne; aggression bonus (+1 ws, bs, s).  Whew!  This chap is quite the fighter.  But now I had to model it!  Lacking anything that remotely resembled chaos hounds, i ordered a box from GW.  Khorne’s number is 8, there were ten in a box, so i had a spare to make a bestial face with.  I scraped away the Nob’s face, then glued in the chaos hound’s muzzle.  as you can see, i didn’t fill it in enough.  I thought it would be alright when painted, but i needed more green stuff.  It’s not a deal-breaker though.  I decided to pass the power glove down to a lieutenant, as i couldn’t see a way of having a weapon hand, a chaos weapon, and a power glove on this model.  If anyone complains that its not game legal I’ll say it’s a bionic arm and doesn’t have any game effect.  I sawed the hand off the nob, then sawed part of the bolt pistol off, and glued the two together.  Sorted! The power axe that the nob already carried could easily pass as an orky chaos weapon.   I chose this nob because he was bigger than the other Orks. Mostly I’m not into the modern Orks, but these nobs (from Assault At Black Reach) work sometimesbecause they’re so big and muscly compared to the RT period Orks.  He really comes across as a gnarled champion of Khorne. For the rest of the Stormboyz I was happy to use RT and 2nd Edition minis.  Normal Orks are a bit beserk, so it stands to reason that Khornate Stormboyz would be smartly dressed and uniform.

I didn’t take a lot of time over the chaos hounds, just experimented with washes and drybrushing.  Worked out OK, but I won’t be showing them off.  I’m a lot happier with the Orks.  My painting skills are improving gradually and I think these are amongst the best I’ve ever done.  I hope you enjoy them.