Speed Painting My First KILL TEAM, Ork Kommandos!

Transcript

Killer Klowns From Outer Space. That’s the name of my first kill team, there’s just no way around it. 

INTRO

Yes, I’m late to the game as always. I haven’t played Warhammer or 40K since 1996 and the same buddy I gamed with back then decided to join me in checking out the current version of Kill Team. Because skirmish just fits the bill over having to buy and paint up 24 square feet worth of miniatures. When I first saw this Octarius box set I knew I kind of wanted to paint up those orc commandos. They just looked cool and I thought Hoffman, with his love of all things World War II and World War I, would probably dig that Krieg unit. 

Is it weird that as a species we tend to make hobbies out of generally horrific things? Just a musing.

Anyway, we agreed to split the cheaper version of the Octarius box and get to painting, so I embarked upon what I think is my biggest speed painting project to date, comprising a total of 12 miniatures. Just cleaning mold lines and assembly took a week of hobby time.

Knowing the classic orc skin tone is green I thought I’d try one of the classic bits of YouTube advice and spray the underside of the minis with an opposite color during the zenithal process, so I went in with some purple ink. The sculpts are very cool and loaded with detail. 

Now detail is awesome and I love it – until I have to paint all of it. But my favorite figures on this team are probably the Squig and the Grot – or, you know, the goblin – with his little grappling hook and diving fins. Like, what the hell does he have diving fins for?

There was one thing I had to do that was kind of unavoidable, and I dislike doing this thing but, well, at least I only had to do it for four of the 12. That thing is: Subassemblies. A few of these guys with the bigger guns just would have been too hard to paint when fully assembled so I gave in and put the subassemblies on their own paint stands. Hoffman just laughed at me cause I think he painted 9 out of his 10 puny Krieg dudes in subassemblies. Yes, I was aghast as well.

My plan for the color scheme had exactly one bullet point: orange shirts. Nope I don’t know why, I just wanted them to be bright, I think. OK I had three bullet points: orange shirts, oil wash, metallic chipping. So to start off I’m throwing down the first skin color. I kind of wanted to do these guys entirely with the Vallejo Xpress colors, but I did end up having to throw in some Citadel contrast paint. Vallejo announced their second batch of Xpress colors which introduces quite a few more hues but as of this paint project, I couldn’t find them anywhere. But anyway, they have a good orange for the shirts so onward we go. 

So the first guy I splashed up with this Xpress green called orc flesh – I mean it’s printed right there on the tin, right, so we got to try it and even though I tell myself I’m speed painting I’m kind of not because I’m still trying all this time to color inside the lines.

Whatever, leave me alone. Transparent paints a pain the behind sometimes.

I like to vary skin tones in units, so I always planned to do different tones on these guys. Plus I’m still learning these Xpress colors so I put on the Snake Green which turned out to be much bluer than I expected but that’s great. It’s a cool color and he’s a cool orc.  

Now for the orange shirt, the main event! Initially I mixed the Xpress orange with Xpress medium thinking I might build up some shadows but the orange was not dense enough for speed painting, so I eventually just went full strength with it. Now I’m still figuring out the overall scheme on these two prototypes and I thought I should get some grungy color on these guys somewhere but this is where the Xpress line falls way short. They just don’t have any colors like this Ratling Grime, so a Citadel we go.

Then of course we gotta separate the boots from the pants so I used the Xpress colors Black Lotus, which is obviously blue. Yes, I know I could’ve mixed shades to get a certain color but that’s against the speed painting rules and you know we are 100% law-abiding citizens on this channel! 

At this point I am becoming very aware of the rising clown suit meter so I’m like hey, some good old fashion OD green will ground these guys, c’mon! So the backpacks they’ve apparently looted from an army surplus cargo boat off the event horizon of some sad imperial guard vacation planet somewhere, one size fits all – they’re getting the olive drab treatment. Which, in point of fact, is a mixed color.

And there’s our first two guys with what is now the official paint scheme. Nothing clown-y about them at all right? What are you talking about? <insert killer clown clip>

So now for blocking in detail bits. They’ve all got these LBE style straps and belts and at first I thought: ooh leather! But brown just gets all muddled in the orange shirt so next I tried black to be more contrasty except I didn’t want to just go straight black, I thought a dark gray would be the ticket. This Sooty Black ink is great but for this, I wanted more coverage quicker so out comes the classic Basilicanum Gray contrast paint.

Side-by-side, I think most would agree the gray black is superior to the brown, so I corrected <insert shining clip> the blue orc’s poor fashion choice. 

Time to base the metal parts in typical black. I plan to highlight some of this with some Vallejo steel to show that it’s metal but since the Xpress line doesn’t have a true black or even a dark gray, we must again go with a typical Citadel contrast black like Black Legion or Black Templar.

I really enjoyed the metallic chipping on the red gun casings on those Infinity figures I painted a while back <snap> and I for sure wanted to do that again with these guys, with the added bonus of all their grenades.

So is there a color I haven’t used yet? Oh yes I’ve missed one of the primary colors! You’re only a half assed clown if you ain’t wearing, at the bare minimum, all the primaries, c’mon!

I like the hue of this Vallejo Xpress yellow a bit more than Citadels Bad Moon yellow. It’s a tad bit warmer or less green in comparison. Oh, don’t worry I’m gonna use the Bad Moon yellow too, you’ll see. When I saw these big axes and some of the metal facemasks on these guys, I thought metallic chipped yellow would be awesome so the axes get the yellow and also the incendiary heads of the potato masher grenades.

Now somehow, in all of my four hours worth of recorded clips, I failed to capture the first time I painted a bed roll fluorescent pink, which is a shame because I feel that is the moment true insanity set in. But all you get is the bed roll strap painting. You’re welcome. For some reason pink bedrolls really just made me laugh, I kept thinking of these guys stealing a cargo container bound for Kmart and cracking it open to find it full of hot pink sleeping bags.

Here’s you can see the Bad Moon yellow vs the Xpress yellow I like the Xpress color better in this particular case.

And here are the first couple of clowns. Game on!

Now I thought I might try to warm up the hands on this guy, put a little blood under the skin, et cetera, right, you’ve seen lotsa people do that on their orcs, but silly me, putting transparent yellow over blue was always gonna make green. And yeah, it IS fun being me sometimes. 

I went for a third green on the next guy’s skin tone and I kinda started painting them in pairs so I could change up the skin tone with each batch. 

This guy I thought would have a blue grenade because I hadn’t used quite the entire rainbow yet and I’m nothing if not a completionist. 

Oh and there’s leather wraps for some stuff so those get Xpress Color copper brown.

Here’s the first subassembly, the rocket launcher and even though I really dislike painting in subassemblies – 100% because of the post-painting, pain in the ass assembly factor – but as far as the actual painting in subassemblies goes, well that’s why you do it, right? So you can easily paint a figure without huge pieces in the way of other pieces.

Red and white rockets was the plan all along and there are hoses and cables and metal boxes and fins and just all kinds of detail. Which again looks fantastic but holy cow is taking a long long time to paint, speedy or otherwise. I mean, look – this guy’s back pack has exactly two big old bullets on it, so of course those have to picked out in a different color. Sheesh.

More yellow is always a good idea, I say, so got cables, got yellow!

And the white rocket heads – if I was a good painter I’d probably do the little checkerboard stripe thing on these but, well, you can see the answer to that question right here.

Squig time! I’m painting him with these three colors just like I would a torch or flame element. Cause all red clearly just ain’t rainbow enough. The straps get a greenish gray, I don’t know why, and then all the bits that are gonna be red metal have to be touched up with the pale gray for the transparency issue. 

He’s got a mouthful of grenades so they have to be blue. I suppose they’re phosphorus grenades. I also think the phrase “mouthful of grenades” should be on a t-shirt.

A squig’s teeth are a major feature of its face, but they’re reminding me that a lot of the orcs have teeth and fingernails I haven’t painted yet. Double sheesh. A quick bit with the light sand paint and then some army painter wash to dirty them up and we’ll call ‘em done.

I painted his wire cable thing in the Citadel Bad Moon yellow because it has that different tint to make it stick out a little bit from the yellow I used on the overall skin.

And the grot! Of the two available heads to choose, I had to pick the scuba mask cause that’s the correct choice, duh. I mean, this little guy’s running around in a wet suit with a grappling hook, like what the hell is going on with this guy! He’s just too cute. I want a Warhammer TV animated series about just this one fellow right here. It’d be fun to write up a little short story for him, he’s so goofy. And what he does on the battlefield is pure comedy, but we’ll chat about that in a later episode.

So he’s got a candy blue wet suit, hey, he likes bright colors – but he’s gotta show team spirit so he’s got himself some orange gloves and orange flippers. And he’s got the standard issue backpack with the OD green but then he’s also nabbed himself a child’s size neon pink bedroll. And there he is, proudly as clown-y as his orc commando buddies.

The big boss is the last dude in the line, even though there’s still a lot to do. I mixed up the light green and the blue green for his flesh, which makes a pretty typical orcish green. His arm is Frankensteined into his cyber claw thing so a little brown to mix up some dead flesh color might work.

I wrestled a lot with deciding where to put the orange on his coat – inside liner vs outside shell. I went back and forth quite a bit, but in the end the flipped collar sold me on the liner being orange. And we’re not gonna mention that it’s a halloween coat now either, just keep that to yourself.

He gets red for all the metal box and casing bits and yellow for the main attraction. And of course he’s gotta have some blue – I mean, where’d all the other commandos get the idea to go full clown suit in the first place, right? That’s right, the director influences the tone of the entire set.

Before doing the last few steps, I had to assemble the subassemblies and this is why I just don’t like doing this whenever possible. The rocket launcher was an easier one to do because it only had one arm in the subassembly. 

And this little piece I almost forgot, but it’s too cool to not put on, so I just slapped the raw plastic with some black paint.

The flamer guy gave me huge problems going together, I should have left one of his arms off but well, gotta deal with it now. This is me fixing the kludgy glue joint that I messed with for like 20 minutes just to get the arms to sit right.

For the base base coats, I grabbed some of this hi-flow golden paint to cover them cause I have these bottles just laying around and hardly use them, so there you go.

Vallejo Metal Color steel is my dark silver metallic paint of choice and while I was mostly just gonna highlight the black metal bits, on the flamer barrel specifically I put a full coat of it so I could try out doing that metal heating effect in a bit.

And now we embark on a step that took a long time and was ridiculously tedious and is definitely not a part of speed painting – until we say it is of course. Metal chipping using that Vallejo metal colors steel and exhaust manifold which is a brighter, slightly warmer metallic. And that exhaust manifold on the yellow is absolutely producing the effect i was hoping for. I really dig it!  

Now the heat rainbow on the flamer, just for fun – are you a clown if you ain’t got a rainbow somewhere? Probably not, you’re just a poser.

Doing all the chipping on these figures took at least three hobby sessions but I didn’t record any more of it, cause it’s all the same technique applied everywhere.

I slapped some brighter desert color on the bases just before the oil wash, figuring I’ll dry brush the bases later.

And finally oil wash time! Typical mix of brown and black and I used a straight brown wash on the yellow bits. 

After letting them sit for 30 minutes I went back in for the wiping off stage and I’m officially unhappy with my technique. Somehow I’ve got to figure out how to do a reverse dry brush with this stuff, because I end up wiping off most of the wash from recesses that I want to hold it and it’s just … frustrating.  

I added some drybrushing and tufts to the bases before matte coating everything and then went back in with the metal colors to brighten up the chipping here and there. And there we go, a full Kill Team speed painted in the same amount of time a real painter would have painted up a fully non-speed painted squad. All in all they’re fine, I’m glad they’re done, but I certainly would like to paint some of these guys with a full attention to detail and not speed painting. But you know it is what it is. Hoffman and I played Kill Team and I have thoughts on it. Again, we’ll address those in a future video. I do dig the Grot tho, he’s just gotta be my favorite. He needs a name, for sure. 

Well, anyway, I guess another project down, that feels good. So, go finish something, you can feel good too!

See ya!

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