Gorkamorka kommishun - an' dere wuz light...

...in more than just one way, actually. Glad I managed to get this post out in less than a month from the previous one. I was going to on Saturday/Monday, but there was a little delay and then stuff happened and I postponed it till today, for a very good reason, as you shall see. Also worth noting probably is that this is the 20th post on Da Wazgarg Rokkaz. A small anniversary, but an important one nonetheless. Somehow I'm able to keep cluttering this little corner of the interwarpz with my ramblings and pictures despite various swings in mood and resulting productive output. Over 3600 views were accumulated since I started in late May, which I have no idea if it's a significant number, considering I only applied to Natfka's banner roll. That's not important though. What's important, is that there seems to be a handful of people who like my work enough to keep checking back every once in a while. I would hereby like to thank you all for this silent encouragement. Furthermore, I would also like to thank Greg and Tim for not so silent encouragement by leaving feedback in my comment section, glad to have you guys here.

Okay, that seems to have turned into a bit of a summary post, which makes sense, seeing as I'm writing it on the last day of 2015. But enough's enough, time for the good stuff and pictures.

The big trukk is pretty much finished, as far as the major things go. I might add a separate reinforced ram, as the current one is attached permanently, but that's it. Finished the last of extra armour panels and added some chain to tie down the stowage. I might just be growing up to the decision to finally glue the engine on along with the exhaust stacks so I can add the mounting brackets and connect the driveshaft.

Gorkamorka kommishun - space created

I don't even know when a month has passed since the last post. Like, I was certain it's been two weeks or so since the last post until I checked. I'm actually disgusted by my atrociously slow work. Which gets me depressed. Which in turn makes it even harder to work on stuff. Vicious circle... There was some stuff accomplished since then though, so there's that. On both vehicles, but most importantly, my workplace. Let's get on to it then, shall we?

The big trukk had a bunch of stuff done, pushing her quite close to being completed, I think. First pair of extra armour was added, as well as a rollbar, and some stowage. The blue exhaust parts were finally glued to the engine block, and had some detailing, welds and damage done to them.

Gorkamorka kommishun - keeps bugging me

Ueeegh, I'm hardly in the mood to write anything extensive this update. It's way overdue I posted one, though. The secret project was finished, hopefully I will get to show it to you soon. This means I can get back to Gorkamorka full swing. Which at the moment isn't very swingy at all. No idea why, everything is just seems so difficult to work with and figure out and on top of that, I don't find any of my ideas satisfying enough. One good thing is that I finally got the first part of my new desk assembled and set up and it's pretty sweet. Finally I can have a dual screen setup. The workdesk will follow as soon as the store restocks the pipes and fittings I still need. But enough ranting. Picture time.

More work was done on the trakk buggy, all the suspension/wheels/treads is done. Also added a simple front bumper, extra armour and started on the driver's cab.

Gorkamorka kommishun - progress is buggy

Sorry to keep you waiting for another update. Originally I intended to post it last Sunday, but since I have Mondays free, I thought I could squeeze a bit more progress into it. But then I rushed back to the secret project, then it got dark and so eventually it kept getting postponed for the whole week.

As you can see, I started on the trakked buggy that was mocked up a while ago, as well as began building up the back of the trukk. That means I can finally have the tracks kept in place in a somewhat stable way. Same goes for the buggy, as soon as I copy it to the other side, I can start figuring out the body.

Gorkamorka kommishun - can't fix woz broken

Just take it apart and try again instead. I've had a small hiatus from the other secret project, so I went back to try and figure out the trukk and it's issues. I stripped the plating from the front only to discover that the problem lies even deeper. I kept trying to figure out just what is wrong until I took a look at my sketches and it finally clicked.

Front wheels were misplaced. Simple as that. Whereas in the sketch they were in line with the front engine, on the model they ended up in the middle between the two. The reason being there was a neat spot for top suspension mount. That in turn made the front feel unnaturally long and made it impossible to come up with anything decent looking.

Gorkamorka kommishun - late and exhausted

Ha! Puns. A very small update today, not a lot of progress to show due to various unforeseen circumstances. Did most of the work on exhausts of the 2nd engine, all the pipes, tubes, welds and all. Since that is done, I can proceed with figuring out the layout of the rollcage and integrating the front with the back in a more coherent flowy way.

Once again, apologies for mediocre photo quality.

Gorkamorka kommishun - goin' sumwere

Yes, that time of the week again. The time when I should have tons of stuff to post. Obviously I have nowhere near as much as I'd like to. Everything goes slower than I want it to, except for the moments when it stops going at all, like yesterday, when I spent the whole day banging my head against my desk trying to figure out what to do with the trakk's front. I did eventually figure something out today and made some meager progress. Still no idea if I like it or not, but if I keep going I'll eventually end up at the point where it's not really feasible to go back.

Here it is then, week's worth of progress on the trukk. Got most of the engine done, bar a ton of details, sorted out front frame and suspension and started on the bodywork of sorts. This thing turned out to be big. Like, really big, way bigger than a standard 40k trukk, it's at least battlewagon-sized. Which I'm overall happy with, as vehicles in 40k are smaller scale than the infantry, meaning this thing is reasonably close to how big an actual big Ork trukk should be in relation to the orkz themselves.

Gorkamorka kommishun - trukkin' on

Here it is, the second weekly self-motivational post. I did get something done, though of course nowhere near as much as I would've liked. Monday and Tuesday (or was it Tuesday and Wednesday?) were absolutely terrible. I absolutely couldn't get myself to do anything at all. Eventually I just gave up and decided to wait it out in my bed with a good book to kill the time. Downtime has passed at some point though and I did some minor progress on the boyz before finally starting on the vehicles.

As you can see on the group shot, there really isn't that much progress, and the vehicles are mostly just mock-ups to see how my sketched ideas hold up when smashed into the unyielding wall of reality. There's gonna be four of them, and I decided to split the variations evenly, so there's gonna be two trukks and two buggies, one wheeled and trakked of each kind.

Gorkamorka kommishun - wurkin' title

Okay, I'm really fed up with the atrocious rate at which I work. Because of that, I'm changing the way I'll be posting updates here. Instead of dropping one whenever enough content has built up, I'll be posting weekly, no matter if I blutacked one mock-up together, or built a whole army. Hopefully the fear of having nothing to post will motivate me enough to cease being an atrociously lazy git.

That being said, measly progress was made. First up, the spanna had his arm assembled and a blowtorch built. Needs a hose going to the button at his belt and a handgun.

Photo quality is slightly worse than usual since I forgot I have to post today and couldn't get enough daylight. Still have yet to buy a proper light setup.

Gorkamorka kommishun - 'alfway dere

As far as the boyz go, at least. Finished up another few boyz, bringing the completed total up to thirteen plus one in progress. Somehow got a tiny bit of a motivation spurt the last few days. Didn't even get stopped by the on/off switch in my mini-drill finally dying. Crawled out to the town in blistering heat and bought a replacement one, along with twenty new blades and a secret thingy. Glad my super basic soldering skills were enough to fix the damn thing, I can't imagine working without it. Neither can I be arsed to dump money on a new one. Anyways, group picture:

As you can see, the crossbow and kannon boyz got finished, and three new were completed, one with a flail and a choppa, another one with a shoota and what can pass as flak armour, I guess and a slaver with a whip, net and a slugga.

Gorkamorka kommishun - blunderin' about

Still trying to kick into a proper working pace, I'm slowly overcoming all the crappy moods and bouts of pessimism. I'm way behind the schedule I was hoping for. By now I'd wanted to have at least all 20 boyz done, and I'm just barely skirting half that number. Wonder if I can somehow get those done until the end of next week. I want to get on to the vehicles dammit.

Meanwhile, here's a group shot showing the boyz in their current state, all 10 of them, 7 of which are done. The shooty nob on the right needs minor work, while the two boyz in front were just test-fitted together and need gluing, filling and detailing.

Gorkamorka kommishun - sluggin' forward

Yeah, so after the last post things went rather unexpectedly downhill. Nothing serious really, just that I hit another one of those periods when there's no point to anything and I can't ever seem to get anything done. It went on for a week. Since I was completely unable to get any creative work done, I decided to settle on re-creative instead. I just sat comfortably in my bed, took out a sketchbook I got specifically to draw stuff for this project that sat unused so far, because I hate my drawing skills (or lack thereof) and went about sketching down all the gunz found in Gorkamorka rulebooks' illustrations. Well, almost all of them, there were a few designs I opted to skip (again, lazy days). A slow drawing session later, this was the result:

What it provides me with, is quick access to handy reference on a single piece of paper. Which is especially useful when trying to come up with my own designs. Not having to flip through the entire book every few minutes helps immensely and makes copypasting ideas way easier.

Gorkamorka - da kommishun projekt

'ere it is den! Da projekt wot I kept mentioning da 'ole time. Gorkamorka it is!

Why am I building stuff for Gorkamorka even though I don't really have a playable 40k army after two years? Well, I've accidentally been commissioned to build two Ork mobs for the game and after a bunch of emails being exchanged I decided to roll with it. I'm supposed to build 20 boyz (including nobz, spannerz and all that), 10 grots, 3 bikes and 4 vehicles (mix of trukks and buggies, 2 regular, 2 trakked) The picture below shows what I'm working with. Of course, my ridiculously large hoard of bits comes in handy every now and then.

I'm having quite a lof of fun with it so far. The range of options is naturally way better than your regular 40k boyz mob, which is pretty much all I've done so far and it's great to play around with. Also, since I'm mostly supposed to convert rather than scratchbuild, things are going faster than I'm used to, which is super nice as well. 

Rokk 'ard, ride free - Da biker nobz

Alright then! Last one of the catch-up posts is here. That means the next one will be of an ongoing project and it should hopefully continue like that. Those are the last minis that I've finished, a trio of nob bikerz that were painted together with the looted wagon.

Once upon a time I bought a box of bits and various crap that looked reasonably useful for its price, though later it turned out to be mostly crappy recasts of various ork parts and I kinda set it aside. Once I actually dug through it fully, I found about ten old ork warbikes, along with a bunch SM/CSM ones. Ended up trading the SM ones to my local crack dealer* buddy for some more ork bitz and decided to see what I can do with the rest. Since I usually tend to overcomplicate things on the first go, I went for nobz rather than regular bikerz, meaning I'd have to make sure they're bigger than regular warbikes.

"Da Boss Killa" Looted Wagon

Okay, so this is the second to last of the catch-up posts. Work on The Project has started, but I'll wait with posting, so that I've a decent amount of material to show. For now, the looted wagon. My first finished vehicle and also quite the conversion, took over a year to finish due to being a testbed for all things conversion related, bunch of direction changes, breaks, lack of motivation and so on.

It's pretty much just your regular looted wagon: get an imperial vehicle, take it apart, reassemble with lots of plasticard and stuff, add a turret or two, rough it up, etc. However, while I did have a rough idea at the beginning, I did not know how much it was going to evolve as the work went on. The name "Boss Killa" comes from a few of my first 40k games where I've fielded it in a very unfinished state. In most of those 500 pts battles it ended up being the last one standing. In two it came under attack by the enemy HQs, the first time by a Chaos Lord on a steed of Slaanesh, which got blown to bits by a lucky rokkit hit after the boomgun shell went wide. The second time it became the target of Saint Celestine who had already used her revive to tank up a boomgun shell which would otherwise have decimated a squad of sisters. Her flamers did nothing to the mighty AV11 and she was subsequently greeted with a boomgun to the face.

'Ard boyz trukka unit

Oh wow, I can hardly believe it's already been two weeks since last post. Time sure flies when you're trying to finish all the bloody assignments on time. But that's in the past now. Semester's wrapped up, holidays have started and I'm winding down after all the rush and slowly getting my room and work desk into shape for upcoming projects. But that's roughly next week, in the meantime, another unit.

A small mob of shield-equipped boyz with a nob, intended to be trukkboyz. Their trukk has yet to be built. They're an extension of a concept from the first unit, that one kneeling boy with a piece of trukk armor. I decided to give myself a small challenge with this bunch, namely using only AoBR boyz as bases and not ending up with a unit of clones.

Whirrr bzzzzz-zap! Big Mek wiv Kustom Force Field

Okay, time for another "stuff I completed before starting this blog" posts. This time it's the first HQ for my army, a Big Mek with a KFF and what can probably be assumed to be a big choppa.

In da beginnin' dere wuz da shootaz

Alright, so here we go with first of the posts that detail all the stuff I've finished so far. I'm gonna space those out so that they cover the period of time left until I'm done with this semester and can dig into hobbying proper.

Those are the first fifteen boyz that I've finished. Didn't really have a clear goal in mind, except for some shootas and maybe 'eavy armour and I played around that with conversions and such, slowly figuring out how to get stuff done, etc. They were mostly a test-bed and training grounds for everything, from cutting stuff up and removing mould lines to working with plasticard and reposing and so on.

'ere we go! - introductory post

Woooo, got the template roughly figured out as far as colours and stuff go. You can probably tell I'm pretty bad at this and I, as a design student, should be ashamed of such a rampant lack of web design skills. Alas, I am not.

Nobody cares anyway, so let's get to the good stuff.

Orkz. Specifically the focus of this blog, my (atrociously) slowly growing army, Da Wazgarg Rokkaz. The name was conceived using that old ork glyph chart thing and boils down to two main components: Waz - synonym for the colour red, also meaning speed, excitement and fright. One of the more common glyphs nowadays, it's the arrow thingy.
The other one is Garg, less known as it's just a square shape. Means huge, terrifying, noisy and powerful. Sounds pretty good for what I intend to be a mix of Goffz and Evil Sunz, leaning heavily towards Kult uv Speed. Goffs to represent a penchant for 'eavy muziks (hence the Rokkaz part) and Evil Sunz for the speed-crazy petrolhead aspect of my take on the greenskins.

'ello? Dis 'ere fing, 'z it workin'?

Oi guyz! 'ow do you use deze zoggin' interwarpz?

So yeah, after almost two years of putting together little plastic orkz at a snail's pace, I decided to start a blog so that I have a place where I can spam as many updates and pictures as I damn well please.

The sole purpose of this post is to give me one so that I can tweak the template and whatnot. Expect a proper introductory post soon. Not that anyone is even gonna stumble upon this stump of a blog anyway. Not before I shamelessly push it into the faces of all the renowned people 'round here, begging for recognition and such.

Oh, and have a picture.