Road to Firefight: Commandos!!!!

10th Feb 2017

Pat "Chopper" Lewis



Sorry for the lateness of the post but with PAX South and the Las Vegas Open back to back I’m playing catch up with all the works.

So let’s talk Commandos! As you saw with my list the last post, the bulk of my force is 2 ten Ork squads of commandos. So with 20 models to paint I decided to tackle that first.

Looking at the fluff we know that the Marauders were the GCPS first fighting force. Being organized and tactical I decided to color scheme the uniforms with a gray and for the highlights and accents I decided to go with red for squad Alpha and a blue for squad Beta.

Now I’ve been an Ork player since the start of tabletop war gaming and I’ve been pretty much painting Ork flesh the same way with just technique change.

My paint collection consists of either Vallejo or Reaper paints. There’s an excellent paint compatibility chart floating around the interwebs should you need it.

So for my Ork flesh I start with a base of Vallejo Dark Green, I then do a 50/50 mix of Dark Green and Vallejo Intermediate Green. Next up comes a layer of Intermediate Green and I finish it off with a highlight of Vallejo Goblin Green.

On the uniform, I started with a base of Vallejo Basalt Grey. The next layer I used Vallejo Stonewall Grey and finished it off with a highlight of 50/50 mix of Stonewall Grey and Vallejo Ghost Grey.

Now the Commandos have a ton of straps and packs and pouch so I mixed it up using various tans and browns. For the main backpack , I used Vallejo Beasty Brown as a base then did a 50/50 mix of Beasty Brown and Vallejo Leather Brown and finish it with a highlight of Leather Brown. For the other pouches I used Leather Brown as a base followed by a 50/50 mix of Leather Brown and Vallejo Plague Brown followed by a highlight of Plague brown. They two schemes of brown I used for all the various pouches and straps on the Commando model.

For the most part that is my paint scheme for my commandos, all the other bits like guns and grenades were painted in a standard metallic paint scheme.

See you next time where I will be tacking the two leaders I’m running in my list, the Commando Capt. and the Warlord.