Space Crusade Reboot, part 3: Dreadnought and original orks

This post is part of a series where I log all the progress I make on rebooting Space Crusade with modern miniatures.

To continue with my Space Crusade reboot project, I now have to do the 4 original orks and the Dreadnought that I managed to keep all these years. The remaining 4 orks that I need to complete the squad will be from a Clip – Boyz Orks box.

The Dreadnought

I’m lucky, as a child I didn’t lose the Dreadnought miniature that came with Space Crusade. It was just badly painted but I manage to remove most of it thanks to some house-cleaning chemicals and a couple of days of patience.

I wanted to paint the dreadnought in a way that it would look grey (as the original color of the mini) and old. Or used/rusted/whatever. That mini is the boss of the game, somehow, and I wanted it to really strike out by all the deads it made in the past!

So, after two coats of grey, I massively shaded the miniature with both Nuln Oil and Agrax Eearthshade.

The base was also made in the idea that the Dreadnought devastated the room of the Space Hulk where it stands, and many many rocks and broken walls are on the floor.

A Space Marine broken helmet and a couple of skulls are even there… I think I like the result so far!

It sill needs some polishing though, but as of now, it’s good enough to continue with the orks.

The Orks

Two of them are base-coated with white and two of them are clean. I’ll base coat the last 2 with Chaos Black. It’ll be fun to see the difference a base coat color can make, as I’ll paint them with the same color scheme.

When I start a new batch of models, I always do the first on its own, in order to find the color scheme I want. For the original Space Crusade orks, there aren’t so many clean examples to be found online, so I decided to compose one that I like.

I’ll stick with the Evil Sunz klan which is about strong red and black combinations. It gives a nice contrast with the green skin and yet gives a dark result.

So far I’ve just focused on the skin, the color scheme comes just afterwards.

Color scheme and details

I managed to finish the first Ork, but I’m not very happy with the color scheme, I think the mistake was to use a pale grey for the pants and shirts. This doesn’t work well, I’ll probably keep it black for the rest of the squad.

I’m happy with the axe though, I tried to do some free hand work here and painted white and black squares, a pattern oftenly seen in Orks schemes. The result is not so bad even though not very precise. I added some grey impacts in order to simulate places where the weapon was hit.

I still have to do 3 Orks like this one, but I’ll try to « fix » my colorscheme to something darker, probably using only black, red and brown.

The Boyz Klan

I used my second black-undercoated Ork to test an alternative of the color scheme I did on the first one. I just remove the grey and the brown from the palette (almost), and I think that works better.

This one has a big sword and I took the opportunity to paint again some white and black squares, to give consistency to the klan!

This has been done by applying two thin coats of White Scar on the sword, in order to get a strong base color. Then, when dry, I painted with my « fine details » brush vertical and horizontal lines of black to create the squares. Afterwards I just needed to color in black some of the squares.

To give an impression of « life » to the sword, I painted small lines of metal here and there, to simulate little impacts. The edges of the sword were also highlighted this way. This works well.

I think I should have done smaller squares, the result would have been even better, I’ll do that for the next one.

Here is a view of the original four Orks, the black and white squares really make them look special!