This article will show you how to paint up Orc Linemen for Blood Bowl. Hopefully you will pick up lots of tips which you can easily extend to any Orc miniatures. The particular Lineman figure is from Chris Pavey's Blood Bowl team The Drunken Knights of Dubbo. You can see the whole team painted up in another article. I actually painted up all 5 Linemen from the team in one go, but only one of them is shown in the step by step photos.

Preparation and Undercoat
Clean any flash off the miniatures and give them a black undercoat (spray paint is best I find as it saves a lot of time, which means you can spend longer getting all that shading and highlighting right :). I prefer to undercoat the figures before glueing them onto their bases. It gives a more even coat onto the miniatures and avoids leaving bare metal at strange angles.

Stage 1
Get a even mix of Chainmail and Boltgun metal and drybrush the miniatures all over. A good way to see if you have the right amount of paint on the brush is to brush the back of your hand. This will give an indication of how much paint will come off the brush onto the miniature. Keep each drybrushing stroke light. It is better to do several light strokes than one heavy stroke to avoid overbrushing the edges.

Stage 2
Paint the areas of flesh a dark green (I used Woodland Green, but I am not sure what the new Citadel Colour equivalent is). Keep it wet, and try not to get it in deep areas like in between the fingers of the clenched fists.
 

Stage 1: Drybrush

Stage 2: Flesh Basecoat

Stage 3: Light Highlight

Stage 3
Mix some slightly lighter green (in my case Woodland Green and Billious Green in approx 3:1 ratio) and paint over the flesh, leaving the basecoat showing in only the deepest recesses. Once again be sure to keep the paint thinned down. By keeping it thin you will avoid getting the streak effect where the dark green meets the light green.

Stage 4
Same as stage 3, but go even lighter still (I used a half half ratio of light green to dark green). Just paint the even more raised areas and remember to keep the paint thin! This is crucial to get the effect right.

Stage 5
Now just use the light green, keeping it thin paint the very raised areas of the Orc's flesh. The Orc's flesh should now be finished, but if you want to get a very smooth and even effect you can add more mediums of dark and light green mix inbetween stages 3, 4 and 5. I tend to find 2 intermediate highlights and the pure lighter colour (in cases where you are adding white to the base colour to get the lighter colours, it is usually not a good idea to go all the way to pure white unless it is on a hard edge) good enough for high quality painted units. Of course if you have a unit of 50 Orc boyz, just one intermediate step is normally enough.
 

Stage 4: More Hightlights

Stage 5: Finish the flesh

Stage 6: Colour the armour

Stage 6
Find a nice colour to contrast the Orc's green flesh. Here I have used Liche Purple, which I will retain for the whole Orc team's colour scheme. It is important to keep the colour schemes simple, as it will speed up your painting time immensly and get those units to the gaming table faster. Also, for miniatures with a black undercoat, I like to use colours that will go over black effectively and leave a nice solid look. Colours like yellow or orange will require that you repaint those areas you wish to do with a lighter colour that will go over black first. In general I like to use Bleached Bone or Skull White.

Stage 7
Two thing happen at this stage. Firstly I highlighted the armour with 4:1 Liche Purple and Skull White mix, then a 3:1 mix of the same colours. I didn't go any lighter than this, but once again you can add as many stages as you want.

Then I paint the teeth (and any other bone coloured bits) with thinned Snakebite Leather. Give them a mid highlight of 1:1 mix Snakebite Leather and Bleached Bone, and then pure Bleached Bone for the final high light. I also painted the eyes Bleached Bone.

Stage 8
I mix a 1:1 mix of Blood Red and Skull White and carefully drybrush the sunz logo on the belt and on the right shoulderpad. Make sure you don't get any paint on the surrounding areas. As you can see from the Stage 8 photo, the deep areas are still Black in colour as the pink paint mix just covers up the metal colour drybrush from Stage 1.
 

Stage 7: Lots of little bits

Stage 8: Paint the sunz

Stage 9: Finish the details

Stage 9
Finish off the sunz logos by painting over them with very thin Blood Red and paint the teeth on the logo with skull white. And while I happened to have the red paint out, I also painted over the Bleached Bone on the eyes.

I then painted the stitches on the face with 2:1 Chaos Black and Skull White mix, and then highlighted them with a 1:2 mix of the same colours.

Now I repaint the boots Chaos Black and paint the steel caps on them with Chainmail. Now all that's left is the base. Paint it Goblin Green and then using PVA glue stick some flock onto it and you're done!
 

All finished! Lets get biffing!

So there you have it, painting Orc Linemen has never been easier. It is very practical to get about 5 miniatures painted up to this standard a night, excluding waiting for the spray paint to dry, I finished all five metal Orc Linemen in under three and a half hours. Tommorrow night I'll finish the two Black Orcs...