WIP: Orktober 31st (Warhammer)

I was sifting through my parts bin the other day, wondering what I could do with what all I had, then it hit me...What if my hundreds of orks played dress up?

First off, let me say, sorry for the wall of text. I wanted to get all of my "thoughts" on this out before I get into the meat of the actual work I'm going to be doing, so you know which direction I'm headed. This project is massive, and you'll only be getting small snippets of what I'm doing at a time, so hopefully this post will give my next few some perspective.

I've always thought of the orks as the "minions" of the Warhammer universe. Bumbling, little disregard for any safety, their own or for others, maybe going out of their way to harm others in the name of mischief and a giggle, just general trouble makers, so I've always enjoyed thinking up little vignettes that would involve them getting into trouble in some way or another.

The general idea came pretty quick. Line up a bunch of gretchin and put some other heads on them, and voila, instant humor. I filed the idea away to revisit at a later date, as I have other kits to deal with. Until I started surfing the web and discovered the Chapel, the "house" I was going to use for the vignette, was no longer in production, so I hustled down to my local Games Workshop store and picked it up. I shelved all other personal projects (as I so often do) and fired this bad boy up.

I started sketching out the idea on a 2x2 board, figuring up little humorous asides as I went, but the chapel would be the centerpiece. The original idea was a small strip of a base, all the little orks single file in a line heading up to the house to get some candy. Pretty simple, if not a little Norman Rockwell-ish.  However, I decided to up the scale a bit, even if I have no idea what to do with a piece this big. That's when I started dreaming up all of the potential things these little guys could be doing to get into trouble to fill this board up.

The box art for the chapel had some OSL coming from the painted flame sconces in the front of the house, so I knew I wanted to do something to one-up that, so I harkened back to my Witch King and how I did flames on his sword, and thinking, "I can make this look SWEET with some LEDs...." Me, knowing nothing about electronic lighting, set off on an adventure, which you'll see chronicled later in depth...but once I started thinking LEDs for the fire, I figured I might as well go all out. 

So there you have it. This should all but consume me over the next two months, on top of the commissions I'm working on, so it was nice knowing you all, and I'll crawl out of my hiding hole in November!