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Gorilla Tutorial: Painting Ogres

By David

Now that Kings of War 2nd Edition has arrived my Mantic Ogres are back at the top of the painting queue as I get ready to upsize my army from 1000 to 2000 points.

Since I'm working on another 24 ogres at the moment it's the perfect time for another Gorilla Tutorial! So let's take a look at how I paint my Ogres…

Preparation & Assembly

The Mantic Ogres are cast in plastic-resin, also known as restic, so they need to be prepped a little differently than hard-plastic miniatures. We've got a useful Working with Plastic-Resin tutorial which covers the basics.

I also did some work using greenstuff and styrene sheets to add some conversions to the models, such as the Scottish style hats and scratch-built siege shields for my unit of Siege Breakers.

Priming

Even though the ogres has quite large areas of exposed skin I decided to spray prime them with Army Painter Gunmetal colour primer, to speed up painting the armour plates.

Skin Tones

Firstly I began by applying two thin layers of AK Interactive Base Flesh, from the Flesh & Skin Colours set. This gives a really strong coverage over the metallic primer and is a great foundation to start layering from.

Then I began to apply layers of highlights working off a wet palette one model at a time as follows:

  • 50/50 Base Flesh/Light Flesh
  • Light Flesh
  • 50/50 Light Flesh/Highlight Flesh
  • Highlight Flesh

By using the wet palette and a small amount of drying retarder in each paint mixture I could wet blend smooth transitions between each layer to give a realistic skin tone.

Once these had dried I then added a thinned layer of Shadow Flesh into the recessed areas of the skin.

Then I finally applied some Dark Shadow Flesh to the most shadowed areas.

Leather, Pants & Hair

There's a lot of leather strap detail on the ogre models and I simply base coated these with warpaints Leather Brown and picked out the buckles and rivets with Gunmetal.

The pants & areas of cloth on the legs were base coated with Vallejo Khaki. Some of the models also have small areas of fur on the legs, these I paint Black to begin with and then apply a couple of layers of grey dry brushing.

The hair and beards are painted in a similar fashion with a variety of different colours.

Then I apply a wash of 50/50 Nuln Oil/Agrax Earthshade and the finally add some spot and edge highlights using the base coat colours again.

Teeth & Nails

I start by base coating the teeth & finger nails with Vallejo Stone Grey. Then I use Bleached Bone, leaving a small area at the base in the original colour, followed by repeating the process with white. Finally I use a light Sepia Wash around the base of the nails & teeth to represent staining.

Armour & Weapons

The armour & weapons were already mostly base-coated from the priming stage, but I find it better to add another base-coat of Gunmetal with a brush just to touch up any areas where the primer did not cover fully, or small areas of excess paint from the skin & leather stages.

Once the base coat was applied I then gave the armour a wash with a 50/50 mix of Nuln Oil/Agrax Earthshade. Once dry this gives a good dull or worn metal finish.

Then I add some small highlights using Steel on the very edges of the armour plates, rivets and under the scratches in the armour to bring out the extra detail and give a beaten & battered appearance.

I also add smaller areas of Vallejo's alcohol based Copper on the shield rims and decorative parts of the weapons as a spot colour to help break up the drab iron armour.

Black Lining

Once all the details such as the skin, armour & leather have been painted I then go back and blackline the transitions between each type of surface.

For instance along the edges of where the leather straps meet the skin I carefully paint a thin line of the 50/50 wash mix to distinctly separate the two.

The Kilt

Over the course of painting the first half of my ogre force I decided upon giving them a bit of a Scottish feel, since the models have small loin-cloths which are not too far off kilts and Mantic's ogre musician is playing something similar to bag-pipes.

So the kilts as I began to think of them gave me a chance to add a small splash of colour to the models, along with some Scottish hats I sculpted onto some of the models.

I started by base-coating the kilts with Something Blue. Then I added a grid pattern of Something Orange using a fine detail brush. In the centre of each square in the tartan I then painted a small area of Lighter Blue, leaving an edge of the dark blue around it.

As the cloth was now in a multi-coloured pattern traditional highlighting and shading wouldn't work. So instead I used some oil paint highlights & shading to give a more natural result over all 3 colours.

If you want to see how I based these units then check out our earlier Unit Basing for Kings of War tutorial.

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