Especially considering how excited I am whenever I see the Games Workshop paint job on their website.

Let me set the scene.

Ever since the Beast Snaggas was released I had a sneaking excitement to paint an Ork army, and I finally had the opportunity to do so.

So naturally I started thinking, how in the hell can I paint an army without spending 400 hours on it and still getting a decent result?

Thankfully it's not my first rodeo painting an army, I should be able to find a color scheme that I can paint in 10-20 hours for an entire Combat Patrol box.

As we tend to do as humans, we stick to the things that are safe, so I'm thinking, let's start with a zenithal highlight.

With that I can easily airbrush in some of the details, like the skin of the Orks and the Squigs with contrast paints, and we're gonna have a great starter, we're just gonna need one highlight too to make it look really amazing.

For the Orks I start with Plaguebearer Flesh from above, and then I use a green ink from below.

As for the Squig skin I use Phoenix Orange from above, and Flesh Terror Red from below.

All of this shot through the airbrush.

We can now start moving in with the brushwork, I just start blocking in all of the colors using contrast paints.

So we use Wildwood and all of the leather and wood and fur parts, and Thief.

We then use the Black Templar on all of the pants and weapons, and I had an idea to make these Ork bad moons, so I'm using Imperial Fist, all of the armor parts to make them yellow.

To add some extra interest to the Ork skin I'm using Vulipus Pink and adding that around the mouth area and around the ears, to make them feel a little bit more alive I guess.

Okay, two more things that I want to add as base coats.

All of the bases need to be painted with a brush.

Then all of the axes I want to add rust paints.

And at this stage I was not feeling it.

I don't know if the paint job itself is bad, but the minis right now, with the paint job, I don't know.

I'm just having such a big problem because these minis are so detailed and I think it's just one of the reasons why I haven't started the 40k Ork army yet.

It's just so much details.

I don't know what to do.

And this feeling came for a couple of different reasons.

I started doubting my color selection.

The air had just completely left my body.

Contrast paints at this stage have a tendency to feel very blotchy.

It did really take me aback in terms of excitement for this project.

You think I would have learned at this point as a painter to trust the process?

There is, however, an overarching problem with this army and I would say almost every 40k army at this point.

That is details on miniatures.

Because all of these minis have too many details and they have too many textures and too many different types of surfaces that makes it really difficult to paint quickly and difficult to create a nice separation between parts and still getting a high nice contrast.

Games Workshop have a tendency to not just add a couple of leather straps and skin and fabric.

No, it's freaking chains, it's earrings, metallic body parts, skulls, furs, tassels, chains on weapons, buckles, extra weapons, shoulder pads.

I don't know.

It's just so many different textures, so many different surfaces that you go crazy.

And when you haven't highlighted them super finely but kind of rush with contrast paints everything at this step looks really messy.

And it just adds so much visual details to the miniatures that it's difficult for you as a viewer to know where to look.

In the end everything has to be painted to at least some form of level.

Sure you can leave some of them to a lower level but at this step of the painting process I was just drained from all of the details.

And we're gonna have to come back to this point but to get to that we're gonna need to move on with the story and how to paint these minis.

To regain some sanity I decided to paint just one of the minis first from start to finish to make sure that he was completely done to at least get a sense of how they would look when they're finished.

I'm ready to start with the highlighting.

On the squig I'm using sunny skin tone to highlight the reds and to make the orange highlight pop.

I then spray the squigs with some orange inks to push the vibrancy even more and smoothen out the transitions.

And as a final step I'm again adding in some more sunny skin tone just to punch the brown and deck tan to highlight the letters and if there's any fur parts.

I highlight any teeth and bones using a mix of different grays, whites and sand tones to make them stand out on the face.

I'm using lime green and ice yellow to highlight up on the orc skin.

This is going to be our main focal point on the miniature so we really want to make it pop.

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For the pistols we're going to keep it simple.

I'm going to dry brush with a metal color from above using just a dark true metal color.

You can use pretty much any metal color that isn't too silver just to make the edges pop on the weapons.

I get to work on edge highlighting all of the axes using light flesh to make them pop and get a nice definition on the surfaces.

So to make the yellow seem a little bit more interesting we use streaky grime and then remove the excess of it using a q-tip.

So this makes it look a little bit too messy so we just edge highlight the thing using ice yellow and bada bing bada boom the armor is done.

As a final detail I add a white dot on the orc's eyes and I then glaze in with some vallejo fluorescent orange.

And with that we should be done with the highlighting of the mini but we still need to do some work on the base.

I add a few drops of vallejo flow improver on the base and make sure it's spread out over the entire surface.

I then stipple in a massive amount of vallejo yellow ochre pigments to make it feel like these bad boys are in a desert.

So Okay so the firk orc is done and I ended up with something that I'm fairly happy with.

The one thing that stands out for me is the orange on the squig skin.

I feel like it's a bit too close to the deserty sand base and the yellow on the armor.

So for the rest of the armor I might do more of a reddish pink highlight on the skin as opposed to the orange but I guess that's neither here nor there.

And I've already done a test painting with a more red squig skin and just take a look at this I feel like it just matches 10 times better with the skin of the orc and the armor and the basing.

There might be a couple of things that I want to talk about that I felt didn't reach the same level as the original Games Workshop artwork.

The first and main one is simply because of the way that I paint.

With some areas maybe not spent as much time on and others get all of the attention with full luminosity and full saturation.

We as viewers watching these minis will focus on the skin.

The skin will have all of your attention and the eyes.

Maybe you look at the weapons later but that's where most of the focus will go.

Meaning that if you start looking really finely in detail on this mini some of the parts will not look as good and it's gonna start looking a little bit messy.

If we compare this to the Games Workshop artwork where every part of the miniature has been painted firstly with a perfect mid-tone it's then been glazed down in some areas and an edge highlighted into perfection and every area has been painted to the exact same luminosity to the exact same saturation and each part is so clearly separated from one another.

I feel like the Games Workshop models are so much cleaner than my alternative in this case and the EviMetal style of painting has always been what Games Workshop do.

EviMetal is the cool kid in the Warhammer office but is also very high maintenance.

To achieve a result as the Games Workshop box art we're talking 10-20 hours minimum on each miniature.

Mint edge highlights, perfect glazing and smooth separation and there's an extreme amount of brush control required in every highlight paste.

This would require so much time.

I cannot state this enough times and I feel like it really shows that they especially on this box art.

But for my armies am I ready to spend that amount of time?

I think the easy answer is I probably never will.

I would probably give up you know three four minis in if I'd even get that far and then I'll be bored to death of the project.

When it comes to this type of miniature when the mini is just over detailed and again this seems to be something that Games Workshop does over and over again it really lends itself well to this type of painting where everything is painted perfectly to the same level over the entire mini.

It really looks clean and when you see the miniature on its box art it doesn't look like there's a ton of detail but when you hold the mini in your hand oh my god.

Games Workshop and the EviMetal style have done a fantastic way of tricking us that these minis are easier to paint than they really are.

So now you've seen me complete the rest of the combat patrol and in the end I think the army is going to look fantastic on the table especially from you know a meter's distance.

And even if the better than my army I'll happily just spend one eighth of the time and finish this box in 20 hours as opposed to 200 plus hours and get a really decent looking army that I'm super happy with and would be happy to field in a tournament.

And keep your eyes peeled because in just a few weeks there is going to be an even more interesting video about these orcs so subscribe if you aren't already, smash like if you want to see more videos, massive thanks to this week's sponsor and of course as always all of our patreons that every month make sure that I can have a salary and do this full time.

With that said have a great day, fuck off motherfuckers!