Painting Experiment: Orange/Yellow Orks Part 2

I'm planning to run a Warhammer 40k escalation campaign with a narrative focus next February. To that end I have to decide on a army to build and paint for it and, because i'm a masochist, I've elected to go for Orks rather than the using the Grey Knights I've already completed. While I love the Grey Knight models the fluff and character of the Ork army is vastly preferable to me. I love custom armies with a great backstory and a focus on having fun rather than winning games, and the Orks are all of these things to a tee!

After the (relatively) successful experiment with orange skin I spent a lot of time agonizing over a color scheme to accompany it. I settled on a bright turquoise produced by Scale 75 and tested it on my original model here.

Turquoise is exactly opposite bright orange on the color wheel and compliments it very nicely. So I quickly moved to get some actual 40k orks to test the scheme on. Thankfully a mate of surgical fame had a partially-used pack of stormboyz he gave me to test my scheme on.

Initially things went great and I loved the way they looked with my orange skin.

The grot inside this rocket is probably my single favorite miniature of all time. I'm dead serious.

However after this it got a little complicated. 40k Orks have tons of different components slapped all over theme, especially these stormboyz figures, and it was tough trying to decide where the turquoise needed to be. I eventually added a secondary color and did the majority of their armor in black as its an absolutely neutral tone, and actually compliments the turquoise and orange quite nicely.

My plan now was to paint turquoise on the clothing and black on the armor with just a few small turquoise accents here and there. But unfortunately even this simple arrangement ended up looking a little too garish given how bright the turquoise i'd chosen was.

The jumpsuits are too much in that color.

To this end I decided to use a burnt umber over a good portion of the clothing to tone things down, and it ended up looking alright. This guy (exempting the red on the rocket) is probably the best indicator of where i'll go with things. Burnt umber clothing, black armor, and turquoise accents here and there in both areas.

Naturally I did some sponge weathering on their armor to give them that properly battered orky look. The black looks lovely with a bit of metallic sponged over it. I also liked the idea of them slapping turquoise paint over the black, which I managed to convey a bit with this guy's eye. I'm going to experiment with adding this sort of "handpainted" turquoise to the armor some more I think.

Unfortunately I messed up the bases after experimenting with different washes on each one. I'm going with a desert theme to accompany the orange/yellow skin tone since they are fungus after all! I'll be getting some new pigments to use on them and further dirty them up. I may also chose a different turquoise color that's slightly less in-your-face about things in order to tone down the palette a bit and make the orange stand out more.

Working with these guys definitely  hammered home how important it is to test your colour-scheme out on some miniatures before starting to paint your force properly. These guys haven't been washed or highlighted yet, or had their details picked out, but even going this far has given be a great understanding of what to do with my chosen scheme. Next up, an Ork battleforce! (And painting a GK librarian when I get bored of assembling things)

Thanks for looking guys!