Dan Becker's Oathmark Orc Infantry 28mm Fantasy Figures

First a photo of the completed miniatures set. You get 30 figures in a box. There are 5 body types and five sets each of arms and weapons for making spear, bow, and hand weapon warriors. There are 20 heads and various shields. You can mix and match the heads, arms, and weapons to get many combinations of warriors.

Although there are enough bits to make 30 spears OR 30 bows OR 30 hand weapons, I have made 10 spears, 10 bows, and 10 hand weapons for this group. The hand weapons consist of swords, maces, and axes.

Here the band of orcs is arrayed on some basic miniatures scenery. Felt table coverings, styrofoam hills, trees, and other features are all standard in the miniatures gaming hobby.

Typical miniatures games include building up an army, setting up a scenario, and forcing the other team to flee or die. Movement is conducted with defined distances for each type of figure. The battles are conducted with dice rolls to simulate the attack and defense values for the figures. Bonuses are added or subtracted for special leaders, weapons, or formations.

These figures are all based on 7/8 inch (22mm) round bases. 7/8 inches is about the size of a US five cent piece. Similarly the US one cent piece is about 3/4 inch (20mm), and the US quarter is about one inch (25mm). These are common base sizes for miniatures games.

I have used steel washers for these figures, but the price of washers is starting to exceed the value of similarly sized coins. For example, when a steel washer exceeds the price of a penny or nickel, people are going to use the nickel for a base.

The figures are epoxied to the base, and some textured acrylic, scenic gravel, and grass are added to make it look natural.

Now I will go through each group of miniatures and describe some details for each group. First I show five archers and their various weapons and poses.

The figures are all painted with Army Painter Speedpaints. Speedpaints are a type of water based ink that shows mostly clear on the highlights and mostly opaque in the crevasses. The contrast wash on the model is then augmented with standard acrylics for details such as the armor and the eyes.

Other products such as Citadel Contrast Paints and Vallejo Xpress are new offerings of the same sort of model paints. They take much less time than the typical shadow/block/highlight and wash/dip methods of getting high contrast miniatures. Here in a previous article of Goblin infantry the Goblins have a noticeably more drab and dull appearance. The Orcs in this article show very vibrant cloth.

One product that I have sitting in the drawer is Dr. Ph Martin's Bombay India Ink. I use these dye-based inks for fine art on paper canvas, but I never tried them on minis. As the color range is awesome, I will revisit using them on minis. Expect some wild outfits soon.

For this photo session I intended to show detailed photos of five miniatures at a time from three different angles. Detail-oriented readers might notice that the next five archer detail photos are missing from the article. In my haste to weed out bad photos, I inadvertently deleted the good photos of the next five archers.

This photo shows the first five spear warriors from the front angle. One special bit is the arm with the flag banner. This is a nice banner with 3 skulls at the top. I have taken toilet paper and made the fabric which hangs on the staff. The toilet paper is painted with dilute red, black, and off-white acrylic paints.

This is the second group of five spear warriors.

These minatures are photographed with a digital camera and lots of light. One give-away that a photo is a miniature and not a life-size model is the depth of field is too shallow. For minis, camera apertures of f16 or smaller are needed to resemble life-size. So this requires lots of light or extremely long exposure times. This photo exposure time is likely around 1 to 2 seconds.

Luckily, there are many modern lights that are great for photography. You can have large, cool studio lights which have intensity and color controls. Or you can have some of the fantastic computer controlled flashes. At least with minis, there is no movement which can show up as a blur with longer exposure times.

Notice the depth of field is controlled to keep the minis in focus and most of the background blurred so as not to distract from the minis.

This last group of photos shows the hand weapons: swords, maces, and axes. The model in the center is intended as a leader with his fancy helmet and horns.

The axe warrior to the right has large battle axe. This is a nice weapon that I used only on this one character.

These are the last five of the Orc infantry. In summary I think these Orc models from North Star Minuatures give a nicely detailed, easy-to-paint set of figures with lots of variety. I am not much of a fantasy gamer, but I think the minis are fantastic. As you can see from previous articles, I have built lots of Golbin cavalry, infantry, beasts, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and others. As long as the models look interesting, I will keep buying.