Earlier this month I shared three of my old Ork battle buggies. I'd made them a few years ago for an Ork armoured column I was assembling, but I only got about halfway through the project before my first child was born.
As a result of life being utterly turned upside down by the newfound responsibility of keeping a child alive, the Ork army got shelved in favour of smaller projects – that I was able to dip in and out of. As many hobbyists have no doubt discovered, it's quite hard to mix paint, superglue and the time needed to carefully wield them, with the 24 hour nature of early parenthood. Having real-life tiny people in your world is not conducive to pursuing a time-consuming hobby focussed on plastic-toy tiny people.
But I'm rambling off topic again. I'm not here to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of being a hobby-dad. I'm here to discuss Orks. In many ways they are not dissimilar to children, or at least to my children: eagerly learning to do things for the first time; leaving discarded food and broken valuables in their wake; gleefully and mischievously disrupting every aspect of life; and generally making places look like a bomb has just detonated.
In my previous post I mentioned that I had a few more half-finished Ork vehicles kicking around my home, waiting for a time when I might feel compelled to grab scalpel and plasticard, and start mek-bashing again. While that time is not quite here, the imminent arrival of Speed Freeks and its associated releases has started to get me excited at the prospect of 'going green' again.
But before I show some work-in-progress shots of some of my remaining Ork vehicles, I thought it worth sharing another of those inspiration illustrations that I sometimes like to sketch out.
This one is ever-so-slightly different to the previous ones (some of which can be seen at the bottom of this post), in that while I was working on the vehicles I couldn't help but think about what a multi-part, multi-pose plastic Ork buggy kit might look like. Like many of my projects I lost interest before the picture fully demonstrated the versatility I had in mind, but I think there's enough to give a good idea of the kind of thing I had envisaged.
Drawing out ideas for miniatures creates a kind of feedback loop of inspiration. I base parts of the drawing on models I am already making, which I then use to provoke new ideas on paper, which can, in turn, make their way into the next model.
The two vehicles above are very much on their way to completion, with me having started to block in some of the basic colours. The truck was once a Ramshackle Games vehicle which I cut up in order to give it some extra bulk, swapping the wheels for bigger ones that I found on toys in a pound shop. The trike was my attempt to give my Orks that Mad Max feel: a bunch of disparate yet rugged vehicles, converted for battle from whatever parts could be gleaned in a society of scant resources.
These other two are considerably further back in the construction process. I'm pretty much building these from scratch in an attempt to construct two final buggy-sized vehicles with their own distinct looks. My feeling is that if I have six very different buggies in my collection, then any further releases from Games Workshop should sit comfortably alongside them, no matter what they look like. United by their differences, so to speak.
The thing that makes me ever so slightly apprehensive is that now that those new releases are imminent, it might not be too long before I'm putting that theory to the test.
The new Ork buggies, from the forthcoming game Speed Freeks, are making a lot of noise on the internet at the moment. At the time of writing there are images out there of three new buggies and a kind of trike. Making noise is very much part of the Ork DNA, but for my part, I prefer making Orks. Especially their cobbled together, beaten-up vehicles, in mismatched design styles. With all the hype out there, it seemed like a good time to share some more of them.
The buggies and half-track in today's post were completed many years ago, so no points off my Addiction Challenge, but I've got three more in the pipeline that I'll try to continue work on, once my Undead project is complete.
These three models are all based on old Games Workshop kits. The one above has undergone the most work, having slowly evolved over the years, as I hacked away at it and added replacement guns and armour. Somewhere underneath all those extra plates and engine parts is the very first Ork Battle Buggy shown here, although I'm honestly not sure how much of it is really left.
This next one is a lot more obvious. It was the plastic Wartrak Skorcha, minus the fuel trailer (which I converted here), but with some relatively straightforward additions instead, including that Grot making some subtle calibrations with a hammer (possibly based on a Gnoblar from the old Ogre Kingdoms range).
And finally, for now, this last model is based on the Gorkamorka era buggy that you can see at the bottom of this link. A kit that I detested from the moment it was released, but faced with few alternatives was pretty much forced to buy and chop up.
I have three more Ork buggies that are still mere works in progress which I'll probably rush right in and share in the next post. After all, a true Ork never waits for the right moment, but just comes straight out, guns blazing. Probably without looking where he's going first. Or checking that his guns are loaded. Or even that he has any guns in the first place.
