Painting Competition: Valentine's Orcs

It's been a while, but I'm back.

I've been keeping pretty busy lately, although little of that time has been spent painting. Between holidays, birthdays, work, family (including potty training twins), and life in general, my gaming has been pushed from the back-burner to the warming tray.

Now that we're back into the year I should be able to dedicate more of my evenings to laying paint on primer. I've been steadily working on a few more Night Wolves for a buddy of mine, but that'll be a separate post.

Most recently, I completed Holiday-themed competition mini. I had something big planned for this year's contest, but it totally fell through about a week before the deadline. Instead of throwing in the towel I brainstormed a completely different concept, built, modeled, primed, and painted it before the Saturday due date.

Here it is:

modeling notes:
* The orc is almost completely unmodified. All I did is replace the usual banner pole with a bit of PVC pipe I'd melted into a curve.
* It turned out shaping a tiny hollow bit of pvc is a lot harder than you'd think. because it's hollow it wanted to bend in a single location rather than a whole curve. I used a candle and moved the pvc over it in smooth motions, bending it a little at a time until it took shape.

 * "Da Kissin Boof" is wrought from a single Haagen Dazs popsicle stick. The night before the mini was due I realized it had some balancing issues, so I created the booth to keep it from falling over all the time. I would've liked to make it a bit bigger, but I only had one stumpy stick to work with.

 * To give the booth a little extra support I attached it to a small piece of movement tray.

* The rope is greenstuff wrapped around a paperclip. I don't think it turned out very well, but I didn't want to do it again.
* The goblin's "wings" are just a bird familiar from the Reaper Bones line. I wanted it to look like they'd just strapped a bird of the goblin's back. I also tried to paint in a few places where the panicked bird had "relieved" itself.
* The rightmost portion of the Goblin's cloak is greenstuff. The feet were in the wrong position and it looked unbalanced when I first put it in place. His right shoe is just a piece of sprue I whittled down & stuck in place.