More experiments in speed painting: GW and Ral Partha orcs

I'm always on the lookout for speed-painting techniques for miniatures. The Whitehack campaign I'm running for my kids and their friends benefits from a steady supply of new monsters - especially ones that the players haven't seen. I'd rather have hundreds of reasonably painted miniatures than a few well-painted ones - and I'm conscious that the gap between my "well-painted" and "decent" is narrow.

My usual speed-painting techniques involve drybrushing and "tinting" - either with washes or thinned-down layers of paint - plus a bit of highlighting on top. I set out some tutorials here and here and here. But I've long been interested in just using washes. So I found this YouTube tutorial interesting.

I've since applied the techniques to a batch of GW plastic orcs that I'm going to base up for Hordes of the Things. This is a very quick way to do an army: a standard HotT force has 24 points of troops, with an "element" (warband, blades, spears, shooters, beasts, knights, etc.) typically counting for 2 points. Heroes and magicians are double, but can only make up half your force in total. So 12 elements of troops is a full side - and such is the bulk of these GW models that they go just two to an element.

I was quite pleased with how the wash technique worked. I'm not a huge fan of these GW orcs, but they are allowing me to create a huge (72 or 96-point) army very quickly. A few individually based miniatures allow the horde to be used in games that require those, too. So these will work in Dragon Rampant or Saga (or in RPGs: I'm not averse to using multi-based hordes in those).

The washes work quite well with these big and cartoony GW plastics, I think, as there are lots of deep recesses to create shadows and large details such as tusks that create contrasting accents when painted normally. But I've also been applying them to miniatures at the opposite end of the 25/28mm scale: the superb Ral Partha orcs by Tom Meier and Jeff Wilhelm. The oldest of the Meier orcs, the "giant goblins" and their smaller kin, were first released in the late 70s.

The problem with painting these miniatures is that they're so finely modelled and delicately detailed that traditional painting methods tend to obscure their finer points (unless you're John Blanche, of course). I suspect that's why there are very few nicely painted examples on the web. But painting them with washes allows the detail to shine through, giving a reasonable result. In other words, I'm surrendering as a painter and letting Messrs Meier and Wilhelm take over.

This technique is also very fast. I'm rapidly creating a good-sized orc horde for Whitehack. I have dozens of painted orcs already, of course (Citadel, Chronicle, Oathmark, etc.). But I feel that our Whitehack campaign is due an invasion by the Black Skull tribe - a hardy breed, if smaller than the cave goblins and pig-faced orcs that have already featured.