Finished - Komissioned Koptas

These minis mark the start of a beautiful new age. 

My goal is to get people to give me bits, minis and books for already painted minis that I have done. My ideal arrangement would be something for nothing, but so far no one has gone for that trade. This is the next best thing. They get painted minis and I get more plastic crack. 

I shy away from painting for money because I find that it is hard to make it worth the time. People really do not want to pay for painting. I had a guy offer me $5 to paint a mini that would take take 10 hours to do properly. Not worth it. 

I am hoping this a the start of something good. 

As for painting this mini, I tried a few new things. I have no painted any Ork bikes or vehicles so far so I was shooting from the hip from the start. I came up with the idea of painting the whole thing silver as a base and then painting 50% of the pieces Mechrite Red and of those places about a third got a touch of Evil Sunz Scarlette. I then applied some watered down Dark Flesh in cretain places for rust. Of the silver places, I painted about half gold and applied some Nihilakh Oxide to the gold places and other random recesses as corrosion. At this point the whole mini got washed Agrax Earthshade. 

I regret that last part. It took all the red areas and made them all the same muddy brown. The Mechrite Red, Evil Sunz Scarlette and Dark Flesh were indistinguishable. I had to touch up each area like it was back to scratch. It was very frustrating. The good news is that everything else turns out great. 

Things I like about this mini are the small conversions, the patchwork style and the advanced weathering. For conversions, I applied mismatched halves of the main body. Garlicson7 had similar halves glued to each other. I accidentally glued dissimilar halves to each other. This resulted in one bike having two exhaust stacks and one not having any. Who cares, it is Ork tek! I like the patchy style of painting Ork vehicles. I think I am going to keep it up when I paint other vehicles. It just needs a little refinement. I really went to town on the weathering. There is three stage chips (I'll have to explain that later), brown rust, green patina, broken-edge highlighting. Man I really pulled out all the stops. 

Things that I didn't like are the lack of difference between reds, the misalignment of the head and the handles. There are some small problems caused by trying to assemble the models after painting them which was necessary to paint things like the chest and face. I was no able to get everything to line up precisely as before. The overall homogeneity of this model bugs me. My goal from the outset was to make it look more cobbled together than it turned out. Right now, it looks like it was made from a red vehicle and a silver one. 

The minis are hard to value because they only game in the Assault on Blackreach box and have no retail price of their own. On eBay (judging by completed auctions) go for between $7 (if you are very very lucky) and $17. The paint job on the minis took me about 8 hours over three days which is surprisingly fast considering how well they turned out. I would value the minis at $10 each and the paint at about twice that at about $17 each for a total of $54. That is about right because he traded me a $60 Codex for them.