Diorama: Ironbreaker v. Black Orc

I had this concept for a duel between a classic Warhammer Ironbreaker and Black Orc for years, but I just wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it and well, wanted more practice. The minis sat there, waiting to be painted.

But after participating in a diorama paint-off challenge with my gaming group, I had more confidence in my abilities to finally give it a go.

Getting into the details

I started first with the Dwarf, testing out some Mr. Color buffable paints, which were really fun to toy with. After that was just leveraging some basic acrylics to lock in all the details. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the coloring of his bird so I went back and used some oil paint (various mixes of white & black) to add some depth.

I’ve painted A TON of Orcs (or rather, Orks) for my Warhammer 40K force, but for the Black Orc I wanted to try out some variations to my skin and black armor recipes. The skin is pretty straight forward with some various Orc flesh colors from GW but I built up the highlights a bit with Dead Flesh from Vallejo. After that I used some oil paints (browns/greens) for a wash and then highlighted the skin back up with some light green oils. For the armor, it was really focused on black and Incubi Darkness (GW) with an all-over black oil wash. I went with an ultra matte varnish all over to really knock it all back down. Now I’ll break down how I came up with the base…

Building and painting the base

In all honesty, the base is what kept me from even approaching this idea in the first place. So many ideas in my head, but I wasn’t sure on the scale of it all. While we were cleaning our apartment, I came across a broken picture frame and figured it’d be a great way to base this display.

I took the backing off the frame so I knew how much space I had to work with. Instead of putting it back in the back of the frame, I was going to place it up top so it’d be more flush. I started to sketch out how I wanted the mountain area to be setup using a mix of foam, plaster rocks, cork and more. At first I had this idea for stairs leading up, but I switched up my mind to having it be more natural. I picked up a few Dwarf basing accessories from Scibor miniatures to give it a bit more detail.

I brought in the minis to test the scale and once I was happy I fleshed out the scene more with bits of slate, some branches from a bush to act like a tree and using some Vallejo lava paste as my base for the ground.

Once that was set I put the scene onto the frame and started to fill in the gaps between it and the frame, trying to blend it more evenly. After that I masked the frame and got to painting!