Ogre Kingdoms: Firebelly Fully Painted!

Old School here with some pics of my Ogre Firebelly. This model is a ton of fun to paint and to play (he is the scourge of the Skaven race locally). After a big hiccup in the fact that the head/arm/flame didn't fit together at all, I simply cut the stream of fire leading from the mouth, glued the head and arm where they belong and then just re sculpted the flam with green stuff. Once that was finished, it was time to lay some paint down. Let's take a look at the final product.



Now the big feature of this model is the flame and as such, I went into the google archive looking at flames and fire, then went out in the yard and lit a fire. I realized that the flame from the firebelly would be more of a flash/flare kind of flame rather than a burning, steady flame, so the light and look should be different. I started throwing hand fulls of very flammable material in and got the basic idea I wanted to run with.

I figured that the OSL should be heavy Orange as that mirrors what I saw in the yard. I also noticed that real flames are never red, but rather shades of yellow or orange.

Another thing I wanted to use was a creeping, flame themed  tribal tattoo. For the tats, I mixed Badab black with equal parts shadow grey and came up with a color that looked like the tattoos I have, so I went with it.

I really wanted to just try a bunch of stuff with this model since the Ogres lend themselves to some cool potential ideas and the model has so many different textures and surfaces. Wolfson play Brettonians, so in my personal tradition of degrading my friends' armies in my own work, I gave the firebelly a color to his ragtag underwear. I imagine that after a good fight, there is nothing better than cooking a knight's horse and making clothes out of the colorful rags!

Personally, I don't really pay the points for the FireBelly to take a great weapon, but the hammer is so cool, that I really don't care if I get hit on WYSIWYG or if I have to pay the extra points. The brass on the hammer, along with the other brass, was painted a base of 50/50 snakebite leather/dwarven bronze, then washed Delvan Mud, given the Patina effect with a little watered down Hawk Turquise/ Thrakka Green and finally highlighted with dwarven bronze.

Going back to the flame, I wanted to really take advantage of it as much as possible, while keeping it realistic. With that said, I made the initial transitions of color on the flame using Mecharius Orange, Tau Sept Ochre and Astronomicon white. I blended the transitions with multiple glazes - progressing into darker colors, while also receding up the flame, so that by the top, it just kind of becomes a darker orange.

The flash really washed out some of the color variation here, but you can see that the smoke is also lit from the bottom, an effect created by painting the smoke from the inside out, using fortress grey for every crack and crevice, then progressing through the greys, but covering less of the smoke piece with each coat. Once the smoke was finished, it was given the orange OSL by holding the model upside down and brushing away from the source of the light with a watered down orange.

Here is a shot from behind that demonstrates what I just discussed.

Smoke is a strange thing to paint as it actually is darker from above than below. To darken it, I used the same mix that I used for the tattoos (it just looked smoggy and greasy). I then washed Badab black into all the rolls of the top part of the smoke.

The sword was a test bed for some of the powder work I have been doing lately. First, I based the blade Boltgun, then stippled on Calthan Brown, followed by Vermin Brown. I then washed the blade in Gryphonne Sepia. With the sepia dry, I varnished the surface and then liberally dusted the blade with a rusty colored powder I have, making sure to keep in away from the edges and to concentrate it near the handle. I then used an eye dropper filled Rubbing Alcohol and dropped it right on the blade. What was left behind was a multi-colored, textured rust effect that I am pretty happy with and will experiment more with in the future.

OSL was something that I had little experience with, so I went with the advise of people I respect from the blogosphere and lit the model from the source of the light to see where the OSL should fall. Above is a photo where I  darkened the orange in photoshop to show where the OSL ended up after I used the aforementioned method.

My basing is standard cork ... and I plan to do a little tut on that in the future ...

The bottom line here is that I am happy with the result and had a lot of fun testing stuff out throughout the process of painting this model. I also can say that I have had quite a bit of fun roasting my enemies so far in the league games as the Firebelly has killed more than the entire 500pt list combined in each game that I have played with them.

Comments as always are appreciated. Someday I will build a light box so I can give you better pics, but for now, I am having to much fun painting and playing. I should get some more playtime in tonight and maybe I will bring the video camera to do a good, old fashioned video report or two.