Kev Adams’ Heartbreaker Orc Warlord (1995)

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I’d planned to take new, better group photos of the Iron Warriors for today’s post, but unfortunately I was feeling under the weather yesterday, and am still that way now – so it didn’t happen. With a solid week of work ahead of me, it’ll hopefully happen next weekend!

In the meantime, here’s a model where I already had the photographs ready. This guy is another of my renovated models. Having been painted back some number of years ago, the overall palette I’d used was more than a little too garish and had a few too many colours for my modern, more refined taste. The solution? Repaint parts of the model, tone some of it down, and give it a new base. Ergo! A new lease on life for this previously rather sad model.

Kev Adams' Heartbreaker Orc Warlord (1995)

The slotta dates this model as sculpted back in 1995. It’s a hella-chunky model, and the huge shoulderpads really give him some heft. I think the rather plain helmet could have been a lot nicer, though. As with much of the old-school stuff in my collection, I purchased this model back in the 1990’s. Part of Kev Adams’ post-GW output, I find it odd that someone like RPE hasn’t re-released it alongside the other Heartbreaker stuff that they have.

Kev Adams' Heartbreaker Orc Warlord (1995)

Originally I’d painted him as a Black Orc, which means I started him before the current line of plastics or their predecessors that share the current aesthetic in metal. I rebased him onto a 32mm base, which fits the figure much more betterer. I also lightened up his skin from the near-black that it was and repainted many of the “soft parts”, making his leather and cloth accessories much more appropriate. Purple pouch? Yellow wristbands? Ugh! Much nicer this way…

11 thoughts on “Kev Adams’ Heartbreaker Orc Warlord (1995)”

    • Thank you Kev. Yeah he fits in well with prety much any of Kev’s sculpts. I’d planned to pick up some of Renegade’s Orcs at some point, bt they seem to have closed down last time I looked. I have a bunch of their WWI British and Germans and they are quite lovely “heroic” style historicals. I should get back to those one day…

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    • Thank you, and I agree on the fur being the highlight. It was if not one of the first, one of the defining models in my own transition from painting fur cloaks and such in a mono “brown or grey” way and taking more note of animal fur patterns and where the cloaks would have originally come from.

      While I’m now happier with the paintwork, to tell the truth, I don’t especially like this model. I think the plainness of the helm is one of the big problems for me. I’ve got another of these somewhere that I started converting years ago – adding ridiculous “viking” horns to the helm and swapping the spearhead out for an axehead. I think when I find it I might add a nose bridge strip to the helm before painting.
      I’m tempted to remove the shoulder spikes as well. Give it a bit more of a lorica segmentata look, though I’d probably paint them (red?) rather than metallic to further differentiate the model from this one.

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      • I’m not keen on the Montefortino look, to be honest. Similarly I don’t like the shallow, half-sized open-face Barbute-style thing that he’s already wearing, so adding a nose-guard will serve to make me dislike the model less. More importantly, there are already horns pinned and glued into it and he’s also armed with a double-headed axe, so I’m already solidly down the path of cartoon orc-viking.

        Of course, a “proper” Roman-themed orc is always a possibility for further down the line. Or indeed, if I find a third one of this figure sitting in a miniatures case (which quite honestly is possible). Though that tree trunk of a shaft is a bit much for even an orcish pilum…

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