Orc's o the Old Skull Tribe come together

Shown here at a recent family reunion:

I wanted to call out some of favorites in the last post but rushed it through. The super-cool ace-of-spades-skull-sperm motif on the one guy's shield is lifted from a banner in White Dwarf. It's really too cool for just a shield so I might have to make a banner for it as well.

Of the Perry orcs, the Mohawk officer is a favorite and am really happy with the yellow and black scales. I did the scales yellow and came back with the black. Ian Miller was the inspiration with his colorful scales. I wonder what I could do with colored ink and technical pens on future figures to try to capture his look and feel in a miniature.

Another Perry favorite is the wolf pelt guy with the Dwarf head. Really happy with both those features. Can't recommend enough, when you paint a wolf, be looking at a wolf, don't fake it, even when your desired result is somewhat cartoony. One of only two or three pre-slotta orcs in the European collection is the one with two handed sword with his tongue out. I think I had to fix up his feat, and I definitely did a tiny bit of work on the tongue. It's funny to think how great these sculpts were so early on. Check out those gnarly severed heads strapped to his back.

Of the Adams orcs, a friend of mine pointed out the expression of the dude with 2-handed axe held in front (bottom pic, far right, 2nd row) and to paraphrase his sentiment: they look so happy but you're not at all fooled. He could go from standing around grinning to lopping heads in a split second. When he's done he'll go back to standing around grinning, no remorse, just fond recollections of it and eager anticipation of doing some more of it. That's why he looks like pleased with himself in the first place. He's got too shrunken heads on his belt as souvenirs. It's these too-pleased-with-themselves orcs you have to watch out for, with the shit-eating grins, as they're true psychopaths.

I also spent ~ an hour converting the crossbow on the crossbow guy. It's one of the old Citadel black plastic ones but is totally carved up and redone. I think I'll be getting some Foundry ones for the rest of the squad if I can as I'm not doing that ten times!

Dig the one with the jaw that juts way out in front. Really like the variations in anatomy between orcs and especially between one of his goblins and another, back in the day. All that diversity really improves the mix. Check out Goblin Lee's blog for a world-class tour of four hundred of them. Love the bearded goblins and I thankfully have a few of those to my name.

You may also see I slipped a few more in here that haven't got the individual-shot treatment yet, the night goblins and squigs. Watch for more night goblins in the future, I pretty much have an army of them. As for the squigs, they are some of my most successful figures of all time I think. Couldn't be more happy with them. I do plan to give their tongues and teeth a coat of gloss varnish, though, and I'll give them the individual treatment when I do.

The set can be viewed in its entirety at flickr along with the rest of my collection. And I put these up on Coolminiornot for any who'd like to do me the service of rating them. Let's show 'em what these old figures can be.