A Prince August orc

Gamers of a certain vintage will remember the Prince August fantasy moulds. These allowed you to cast your own miniatures in the kitchen (after overcoming considerable parental protest).

At one point, I think the miniatures were also available direct from the company - and these were always much sharper castings than you could typically produce at home. I'm pretty sure that this fellow is one of those. Alas, while the moulds are still available, the cast range appears not to be.

I always liked the style of their orcs, hobgoblins and goblins - the last of these perfect for Alan Garner's svart-alfar. I only ever owned one mould: the orc archer that accompanied this fellow in the full three-figure mould. That allowed me to churn out an army of small orc archers (fielded as goblins in Warhammer).

One thing that's nice about them is their size. They're 25mm rather than 28mm, but the orcs were presumably intended to be quite large at that scale, so they work about right as D&D-style one-hit-die foes.

I wanted to experiment with a very fast painting technique here. Drybrushing (the usual refuge of a scoundrel!) isn't much use with these miniatures, as they're fairly smooth. So I painted all the base colours on and then washed everything with Agrax Earthshade. It was then just a case of adding base-colour highlights and a second touch in a lighter colour. The skin and the red clothing got a third highlight too. And that was that.

I have a dozen or so of the same designer's Mithril orcs (Mithril was or is a subsidiary of Prince August) and, perhaps, some of my home-cast archers lurking in the leadpile. I'm going to dust them off and paint them to match this fellow. One can never have enough bands of RPG humanoids - and I have a female or two and some infants to go with this lot.