Fourth Boy Ready: Learning to Paint Orks One Model at a Time
Stas dropped a small but very satisfying update into our chat recently: the fourth Ork boy is done. And honestly, this is exactly the kind of hobby progress we love seeing — not just finished models, but all the experimenting, second-guessing, and little victories that happen along the way.
Our first reaction was basically: look at him go, painting so fast! Stas was a bit more realistic about it though — apparently it still takes about one full day per ork. Which, to be fair, is both slow and fast in the way hobby time always is. A whole day for one infantry model sounds like a lot, but when you’re still figuring out your process and trying new things on every miniature, that’s just part of the journey.
And that’s really the heart of this update: each boy has been painted a little differently so far. Rather than locking into one recipe immediately, Stas has been using the squad as a test bed for techniques.
That means wrestling with some of the classic painting hurdles:
- highlights that are harder than they look,
- mixing custom colors and not quite getting the result you wanted,
- trying out blood effects on the axe,
- adding rust to the gun,
- and attempting to shade the horns on the helmet.
We liked the phrase Stas used for all of this: baby steps. That feels very real. Sometimes hobby progress isn’t about suddenly painting a perfect unit at record speed. Sometimes it’s about trying one new thing, then another, and slowly building confidence model by model.
There’s also a very relatable mountain of green still ahead. From this box alone, Stas still has 7 more boys to paint. After that there are 11 more from a second set, plus a hero, three koptas, and a scrap-mech in the broader plan — although none of that has been bought yet.
Which leads to the other half of the conversation: before committing to all the extra purchases, Stas said he’d really like to watch us play some CP first. That sounds like a very sensible hobby instinct to us. Paint what you’ve got, see the game in action, then decide what deserves a place in the next wave of plastic.
So for now: one more ork joins the mob, the technique keeps evolving, and the pile of future ideas remains gloriously dangerous.
Very ork, really.
If we manage to get a CP game on the table soon, we’ll definitely make sure Stas gets to see how it all looks in action before the shopping list grows even more.