40K Ork Apocalypse army / Spring clean challenge / how i'm beating the boredom of the Covid 19 lock down...
"I see a bad moon a-rising".... And also painting Yellow....
Dakka Jet (finished) and Burna Bomber (in Progress) 
Dakka jet, Morkanaut and Battle wagon all finished using Fiat Broom Yellow as a base coat. Mek Gun is still in progress...
Trukk And Deffkoptas have more worky bits on show then the others so got a rust brown base instead of yellow.
Bad Moons Trukk along side an Evil Sunz Trukk. If I had base coated the Bad Moons Trukk yellow, it would have looked very different and in my mind, not blended in with the rest of the army.
Bad Moons Koptas along side a couple of Evil Sunz ones. It was massively easier painting red over base brown then it was to do Yellow, which took around 3 coats!
You can see the difference in painting styles here. Base yellow on the left and base rust brown on the right. Like this they stand out a bit but on the battlefield you hardly notice.
Finished Loota (just the base to do) shows how little Yellow there actually is.
The characters have a bit more yellow surface area, but not by much...For those of you who don’t know a lot about Orks, they are essentially split into 6 clans or factions if you will, each with it’s own distinctive colour and behaviour.
- Goffs like black and white and prefer melee combat
- Evil Sunz like red and like going fast on bikes or other vehicles
- DeffSkulls like blue because it brings them luck
- Snakebites prefer old ways and shun away from technology
- Blood axes are (for Orks) intelligent and use tactics and what not…
- And lastly there’s the subject of this post. Bad Moons, they like big guns and expensive weapons…. but they also like yellow…. and I hate yellow…..
Why do I hate yellow? Because no matter what I do, I have never been able to get it to a finished shade I’m happy with, it’s so thin it takes about 90-million coats before it looks like it should do, and both of these work directly against my philosophy of speed painting to a table enough standard. Poo.
*Sigh*
But Bad Moons like yellow and they fire the big guns, and I want big guns so i’m going to have to “Suck it up Buttercup” and learn to paint some damn yellow.
As far as the rules for Bad Moons go, they are pretty strong. Orks can’t generally shoot worth a s**t and the Bad Moons are no exception needing 5+ to score a hit at any kind of range. But, they have a few stratagems that can really boost their damage output and if the dice gods smile on you, the damage output can be insane.
The biggest explosion came against an Imperial force with a Shokk attack gun (more on him in a later post). As a Bad Moon he fired at and blew up in one volley, an Imperial Guard Storm Sword (a very big tank) and then I fired him again and blew up a Leman Russ Executioner… He did 36 wounds and removed 570 points from my opponents army while him self only having 4 wounds and costs 80 points….
So yellow it is.
I had decided that to save time, I would use an aerosol on the vehicles as much as possible, while switching to contrast paints for the infantry. The infantry doesn’t have a massive amount of area devoted to the colour yellow, but it was still a pain…
Vehicles
A quick trip to Halfords and I returned with a can of Fiat Broom Yellow. Its about as close as I could get to any of the GW yellows but as soon as I’d sprayed the first few models, i knew it was going to have to be darkened down a lot. Que up some Agrax Earth shade wash and suddenly, painting yellow didn’t seem so bad after all.
Now this was all done before I discovered the PlastiKote rust in a can so as a result, these vehicles don’t appear to be anywhere near as run down or dirty as their more recently painted counterparts. The Dakka Jet, Battle Wagon and Morkanaut were all completed to a good standard and I wasn’t going to start again.
But with the next batch of Yellow vehicles I did use the rust base first.
The Trukk and Deff Koptas have a lot more “Worky bits” on show so I decided to use the rust brown on them. Besides I had already painted an Evil Sunz Trukk and Deff Koptas with rust brown base and I was very happy with the way they came out.
It did mean 3 coats of yellow by hand on the Trukk and Koptas but i’m more then happy with the finished results. I did have to spend more time per model then I would have preferred… but they are done now… and i’m never doing any more.
Infantry
As mentioned earlier, the Bad Moons infantry doesn’t have a massive area of the model given over to yellow. And the army list for bad moons consist predominantly of Grots. Grots don’t get any of the rules bonuses that Orks do, they are just cannon fodder. I won’t go into too much detail about the Grots as they have their own post coming up.
Most of the Bad Moons infantry models consist of characters and heavy weapons troops and none of them have a lot of yellow to paint (ok the Mek has a bit but that’s it) so I decided to pop my cherry, and try some contrast paints.
I learned very quickly that contrast paints don’t like going over other paints, unless it’s a white base coat, and this is especially true of yellow. It did slow me down in the painting of these models but I still achieved a decent time vs results ratio.
Over all i’m quite happy with the results of my Bad Moons detachment, and as soon as GW re-opens there will be a big mob of yellow shoota boys to paint!
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