Painting Progress – 29th January 2021

It’s taken a couple of weeks, but I have now completed my second ‘block’ of Oathmark Goblins – the swordsmen. I must admit, I do prefer the look of these Goblins as swordsmen rather than spearmen – in fact, I am currently wishing that I had built three squads of swordsmen and only one squad of archers, but that is a purely aesthetic point-of-view, rather than anything tactical from a gaming perspective.

After asking some advice on our regular Saturday paint-and-chat, I painted these models slightly differently, in that I painted them in groups of 5, rather than my usual approach of painting a full unit at a time. I was surprised how much of a difference this simple change made. I found that I could finish five figures during the average chat session (about 3 hours – hey, no one said I was a quick painter!) which added a new sense of accomplishment, which in turn fed the motivation to paint more models, so a nice positive feedback loop was established. As a result I completed these models over the course of a couple of weekends, and then completed the basing of them all together over three evenings – it’s difficult to speed the basing process up as the limiting factor is how long it takes for PVA glue to dry.

These models are primarily painted with GW Contrast Paint, with the exception of the metals and shields:

• Flesh – Ork Flesh
• Clothing – Goregrunta Fur
• Leggings – a mix of Nazdreg Yellow and Militarum Green
• Belts/pouches – Snakebite Leather
• Boots – Wyldwood
• Fur – Basilicanum Grey
• Hair – Black Templar
• Armour – Coat d’Arms Chainmail with an Army Painter Dark Tone wash.
• Shields – Abbadon Black

In hindsight, I have a couple of issues with my colour choices.

Contrast Ork Flesh is VERY green, probably a little too green for my liking if I am being perfectly honest, but having already started down that road with the spearmen, I wasn’t about to go back and change it after I had already finished 20 figures. If I was to paint this army again, I would probably paint the skin in a more green/grey colour – perhaps something like Gryphcharger Grey. However, the current colour does make these models distinctive from anything else I have done.

I probably should have mixed the clothing colour scheme up a little to make the look a little more rag-tag – swapping the brown colours around on various models, which is something I did when I painted my Gnoll Warband. That said, these Goblins are supposed to be an army, so the colours do bring the models together, whilst they still look somewhat rag-tag due to the different clothing styles and headgear.

So overall I am pretty pleased with how these have come out – now it’s onto the archers.