In the background, my forest-making journey has continued.

While I already had some stuff I could use as new trees, as well as some weird-lookin' 3D-printable plants, I was inspired last year to try and scratch build my own when I came across the Karl Makes Stuff Youtube channel.

In one of his vids, he makes some simple and effective looking trees using wire and twine, and I thought I'd give it a go.

I wasn't happy with my first try, so it went in the bin. But a while later, armed with this experience, I set up to have another go with a better idea of what to do.

While not perfect, I was much happier with what came out of this little session. Then I just had to wait for the temperatures to get a little milder so that I could get some spray cans out and give them a blast.

I sprayed them each with different colours, using different combinations from below and above, so that there would be a bit of variety.

They're not particularly natural looking tree colours, but they are for sci-fi games so they can be whatever colours I want.

At this point, I still have no idea whether this is all going to work. I need to flock them with some "leaves" first, but to do that, I've got to make myself a bunch of crazy-coloured flock...

After my shambolic efforts at painting my Epic Evil Sunz, which took well over four years, an opportunity soon arose to try and right the ship somewhat.

This month, work has been very light, so I had an opportunity to dig my heels in and really try to get something done. Much like what I attempted with the Epic Androids a couple of years ago, I decided to start a project from scratch and try and smash the entire thing out in the time I had available.

My choice this time was another Ork clan, which was the Goffs. Perhaps I was being a bit silly trying to paint such a force in a single month. Yes, they are about half the size of the Evil Sunz, but one month is a far smaller amount of time than four years.

And on top of that, this clan included my other Mega Gargant.

What led me to choosing these ladz over some of my other models is that the Goffs predominantly wear black, a colour I think works by simply drybrushing it a dark grey then throwing a black wash over the top. Couple this with the fact that they were already undercoated in black and ready to go, I figured a huge chunk of the work could be done with very little effort.

I wasn't going to paint the green skin or white accents before the black wash, as I didn't want to muddy them. But it didn't take long to get all of the small models drybrushed grey, and get their red accents and metallic weapons all painted, so that I could get them washed. Just a few days through the month and in my head it felt like I was flying along.

I got the Stompas and Gibletgrinda to the same point, and then ran straight into a brick wall when the Mega Gargant rolled up to the painting area.

This thing was in a right state. There was still a lot of flashing to remove and filing to do, and bits had even fallen off since it had last been used back in the 1990s. Man, we really should have taken better care of this stuff back in the day.

I decided to stick with the gargant until it was completed, and it wasn't until nearly two weeks later that I could go back to the other models.

Something interesting with this lot is that these are the first 6mm infantry models I've ever painted that are on the Epic 40,000 "strip" style bases, rather then the classic square bases from the previous version of the game.

These other bases certainly make the models easier to paint, but they are so much worse in every other way. For a start, I much prefer the look of the old bases, how they make the models look like they are in a squad rather than just in a line.
Square bases also look better when they are "clumped up" for photos in my opinion.

Also, the long, thin profile of the strip bases seemingly makes them susceptible to bending. It's weird, but some of them just don't sit flat at all. All these years have gone by and I've only just realised this.

By half way through the month I was flagging big time. I wanted nothing more than to move on and play a computer game, or do anything else, but I just kept thinking about all of the painting delays I've had, and really needed this to be a challenge I didn't fail.

So I trudged on, and happily managed to put down the brush on Jan 26th, a whole 5 days early. Yeah sure, I didn't try as hard with these as I did with the Evil Sunz, and I still needed to flock the bases, but I'm classing this as a major win.

I've checked my little paint tracker spreadsheet, and I have noticed that if I paint another similar-sized clan such as the Deathskulls, I will be exactly 50% through all of my Epic models. So while I should probably get straight on with that, I think I really need a break from painting Orks for a while...

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So it's 4 clans down, and 3 to go. This one was painted in record time, for me anyway.

It's definitely good to get the Goffs done, to give my painted force some much needed close combat crunchin' capability.

Hip hip hip hooray!

What a long slog it has been over the last few years in my efforts to get these ladz all painted.

It was actually all the way back in mid 2020, just after the lockdowns started, when my Epic Evil Sunz painting journey began.

Now, I never intended to work on them non-stop, and it was always the plan to do some of these, then paint something else, then come back to these, and so on.

Still, it's certainly been yet another one of my painting failures for it to take this long. Looking back, I see I have not actually finished an Epic Ork clan since May 2022. And to think I was hoping to complete all of the Orks that year. I've still got four clans left!

Nevertheless, I'm happy they are done, and as they are by far the biggest and most difficult of the clans, hopefully things will get easier from here.

I'd been waiting for months to hopefully use the work unit to set my boards up and get them finished. Problem was, I really needed to wait for there to be space in the unit over a weekend, and for it to be decent enough weather that I could transport the boards without them getting absolutely soaking wet.

So wait I did.

Then I learned in early December that the unit was soon to be off limits for good, so I was forced into action. Unfortunately, while a 3-day weekend soon arrived with some space in the unit and nobody around, it was certainly not nice weather.

In addition, as has been the case throughout this entire process, I made a lot of mistakes.

Firstly, I decided to paint the river before tackling anything else. For some reason, I thought painting it after the grout and flock had been glued on would be more difficult. What I failed to anticipate was the state the river would end up in after scattering the grout on. It got absolutely covered in dust, which has not come off entirely, so I'll have to paint it again anyway.
Oh well.

The original plan after glueing the grout down was to seal it. I really, really should have done this as I would have discovered a problem sooner, but I was so short on time that I went straight to glueing the flock on top.
After all, I figured that next layer of glue would seal the grout down anyway.

During the flocking phase, I came up against another little issue when I somehow ran out of glue. What had been a brand new 1 litre tub just the day before had now run completely dry. Though there was a store nearby, by this point it was getting pretty late, and the store would have long been closed. I made the glue go as far as I could, but the two big boards were not as covered in flock as I'd hoped.
Oh well.

The next day was sealing day. I'd got a squirty bottle all mixed up from back in the summer when I was originally going to do this, so I didn't need any more glue yet. Or so I thought.
With Storm Darragh battering the unit from all sides, I went for the big squirt. However, the glue decided to block up the nozzle, and I couldn't get anything out of it after the first couple of trigger pulls.
Sigh.

Try as I might, I couldn't clear the nozzle, and I couldn't buy another bottle or any more glue as I had not got my wallet with me. I also didn't have time to get home and back as my evening was already booked for some Dune: Imperium goodness.

As I'm a bit of a numpty, I just thought maybe I'd mixed too much glue into the bottle and it was a bit too thick to propel through the nozzle. So instead, I took the top off, put my finger in the hole so just a little glue could trickle out, and elected to pour it onto the boards.
And that was when I saw how gloopy the glue had gone in the intervening months. There were endless, thick white blobby bits all over the place.
Sigh.

While I had planned to leave the boards for the entire final day in order for them to set, I instead had to go back with new glue and bottle to finally drench them down.
Firstly, I checked where I'd tipped the crappy glue on the day before, and somehow the flock here was still very loose when I rubbed my fingers across it. I'd thought that bit of flock would have been absolutely nailed down, but it seemed nothing was going to go well for me during this endeavour.

It was satisfying to eventually let rip with the sealer, and I absolutely hosed those boards down. It probably wasn't going to be as good as it could have been, as I'd not put any varnish into this seal mix like I had the one before, and the glue was now only going to get 18 hours to set instead of about 30 like I'd originally hoped.
And they only got 18 hours because I made my way down to the unit at 5 o'clock the next morning to clear them away before the work week started.
Sigh.

After all that, I'm left at a point where I still need to apply some static grass. Before I do that, I think I need some better glue, and probably a proper applicator.

In addition, with no space available to me at all from this point forth, I'm really unsure how I'm ever going to finish these. It might be a summer job so I can leave them set up outside for days on end.

Good job I've not thrown away the old boards yet...