Orcses!

     Here are some photos of the various orcs I've painted over the last few years.  Many of them I've had for 10 or 15 years, from the very first releases of GW's Lord of the Rings miniatures.   The old ones have been repainted.

Some warg riders, including my favorite (second from left), whom I call Magua.

Mirkwood orcs.  I'm very pleased with the color scheme: pallid flesh set against black armor, with a lot of unhealthy purple/grey colors on the cloth.  I hoped to give them a vaguely ghostly look as befits the soldiery of Dol Guldur.  Bases are unfinished (the leaf litter needs work).  And it goes without saying that the old metal orc sculpts are just fantastic - far better than the plastic ones.  A few personal notes: the face on the banner is one of my first attempts at free-hand (done 13 years ago) and survived the repaint, while the rather greenish orc on the right was for many years my favorite GW model and one of the first I ever painted, so I redid him in the same colors I used back in 2002.

Hobbit goblins.  I wasn't crazy about the idea of mutant goblins when I saw An Unexpected Journey, but the sculpts are so wonderful that I couldn't help getting a few.  I think of them as devolved or diseased orcs (like the Globsnaga in LotRO), repulsive even by orcish standards and condemned to the lowest and most squalid tunnels. They remind me of Morlocks, so perhaps I should call them Morlorcs?  The blind one in the second photo is a sort of shaman, and he has a little midget goblin to help guide him along the tunnels.

Now that I look at them, the black-lining seems a bit heavy, and the one with the whip might have to be altered considerably.

When the Fellowship travel down the Anduin and pass the Brown Lands, they come under fire from orc archers stationed on the East Bank of the river. There are also allusions in the books and appendices to occasional orc raids across the River into Rohan.  I thought it would be fun to build a small Brown Lands orc patrol, of which the above is the start.  Predictably, they're mainly brown.

And my favorites, the goblins.  I think the Moria goblins are the closest PJ came to Tolkien's orcs in terms of stature and appearance.  They're just so neat-looking.  I never get tired of converting and painting them.