Ogres, Games Workshop - Part 1 of 5

Ahoy there shipmates and me fellow landlubber hearties (sorry, that's enough pirate talk from me), these plastic ogre figures from Games Workshop detailed in this post were made and painted especially for my old shipmate Ade. He has a very entertaining YouTube channel 'WargamingForFun' (does exactly what it says on the tin) which is mainly based on games using Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy, although he has plans to expand to cover other gaming systems and manufacturers.

Ogre Avery and his merry band of cut-throat pirates

As I wanted to give Ade something in return for all of his recent hospitality in his man-cave I offered to paint up some figures for him. Making and painting fantasy figures is an ideal opportunity to do something completely different from my usual drawn out historical projects.

If you watch the videos you may notice one of Ade's current favourite army's is that of the Ogre Kingdom. The basic core units of the army are obviously your standard Ogres, these are big figures, literally twice the size of other figures. They are currently £23 for six ogres (£3.83 per figure). Ade had himself recently completed some very impressive figures based on a pirate theme, so with this great idea in mind I decided to have a go myself. Ade handed over two ogres but I suggested a group of four, giving me an ideal base from which to start; the usual three figure command group plus a normal figure to even up the numbers.

Some of the painting and modification ideas were immediately obvious.
Pirate flag - check,
Wooden false leg - check,
Cutlasses - check,
Pistols and muskets - check.

With all this in mind I armed myself to the teeth, proper pirate fashion, with scalpel, plastic cutters, needle files, greenstuff and paintbrushes and went to work. I was in modeling modifying heaven.

Ogres crossing Abbey Road

I've played down the butcher aspect of the ogres and tried to emphasise the more nautical theme. I'll go into more detail on individual posts highlighting the modification on each figure (hence five posts in total).

Regarding the overall 'look' of the figures I used my normal basic technique of block painting, applying the appropriate coloured wash and then finishing with a complimentary highlight to the base colour. As pirates didn't have a standard uniform back in the ye olden days I decided to keep the paint jobs relatively simply. Bog standard Citadel Foundation paints were used straight from the pot, using a different colour for each ogre's clothing; although it may be worth noting that I intentionally used red on each figure to tie them together colour-wise as a group.

Ogres coming back across Abbey Road

The bases were simply covered in sand and painted with Foundry's Base Sand 10A, B and C.

Painting-wise these miniatures are never going to be Golden Demon winners, but that was never the plan. Look closely and you'll see that they are actually quite crude. This isn't false modesty on my behalf or a crude amount to fish for compliments, for instance I don't blend the paints and apply multi-layered highlights. These figures are meant to be handled and played with. In fact they have already survived being dropped several times and the drunken attempts of an pickled painter (i.e. me after an evening of drinking real ale) having a go at them.

I'll be publishing four more posts on these ogres, one every day. So, in the immortal words of Casey Kasem, "Details coming up!"