Finished the Warg Riders that I mentioned the other day. As I said in that post, I have had these sitting around for several months now waiting to be painted.
In the end it was much easier than I thought it would be. The key to painting them was to first of all basecoat them in Chaos Black and then wet-brush them in Bestial Brown. This gave them the dirty look universal to all Orcs in Middle-earth. It was then a matter of painting the warg mains in Snakebite Leather, then use a heavy drybrush with a dark grey for the face, followed by a light drybrush with a light grey again for the face.
For the riders, I used Boltgun Metal heavy drybrush for the armour, and then picked out special features, such as the arrow fletching or fur clothing, in a suitable colour. The skin of most of the orcs I left in the brown colour, but some of the orc flesh was painted in Rakarth Flesh, some others in Administratum Grey and some others still in a light green. I washed the entire model in a brown wash to blend the colour transitions and to give the extra dirk look. The brown wash also gives a tinge of rust to the armour and weapons, just the way orcs liken them.
I deliberately left the orc shields without any insignia on them. This is so the Warg Riders can be used for Isengard, Mordor, Angmar, Moria, Mount Gundabad, etc. The Warg Rider leaders are the only ones to carry any insignia on them and thus identify where these guys come from.
You can see a bit of the diversity in poses amongst the Wargs and Orcs in the two images below.
The play testing stats for these guys is currently as follows:
Type Attack Range Hits Armour Unit Size Pts per Unit Min/Max Special
Cavalry 4/1 15 3 6+ 3 ? (80 to 100?) - / 2 Shock Cav. (WMA)
Final picture below shows the Warg Rider leader next to an Isengard Sub-general. You can see how the size of the Warg Riders compare to the size of Isengard Sub-general and see that they fit together well.
So only need to do the bases of these guy's and they are ready to chase down Rohan citizens or thirteen shabby Dwarves and one well dressed Hobbit!
