Painting those old plastic shields

Having hit a bit of a wall with the orcs I've decided to turn my attention to their shields and I'm stumped as to what to do. I like the old arcane armorials decals but one thing has always bothered me - where do the orcs and goblins get so many talented painters and why do they spend there time painting shields? So then I was thinking something simpler, more along the lines of a white had or red eye (or something less more perhaps). Ot something simpler like viking or other dark age shields. Can't make up my mind.

But thats not all. What about the back of the shields? Obviously they are meant to be wooden but they are flat. Has anyone had any luck carving them to make them appear wooden? Or are there any tips for 3D efying a timber effect.

Your help, advice and suggestions are required.

Wood Grain, especially on the back of a shield where it's hard to see is really easy to paint. Paint it dark brown, and then with a slightly lighter shade, mark out the board (conversely, you can take a darker shade and paint the lines between the boards). I usually divide the back of a shield into about 3 boards, one in the center and one off to each side. Then just keeping mixing in a lighter earth tone (bone works well, so do some grays) and paint slightly wavy lines up and down the "boards," trying to stay on the previous lines. Just make sure your brush has a good point.

I actually score mine with a craft knife, paint a base coat of brown, inkwash with sepia and then a lighter drybrush





As for designs -

My Harboth boys used their shield design for a little extra practice!



Or go with a theme -

Severed Hand







Ruglud's bunch nicked their's off of some Chaos boys - hence all the fancy designs



Simple Orc runes are nice and easy

Thanks for that lads - I'll have a try at both backs and see which is easier/nicer. Now I just need to come up with some suitable runes for the orcs. I like the targets on the shields, I'd forgotten about them. Gave me a chuckle when I saw them on your blog the first time.

I don't score, I paint wood grain. It's hella easy and looks good enough. Here are a few examples. I do it on the back of all my shields and on the front sometimes.

I usually paint it black, then paint in the boards with scorched brown, mix in snakebite or something and lighten it, and do streaks with light AND dark paint. It's all just a bunch of mucking about, really. Use thinned paints, as always. =)

My main epiphany when doing shields like this is it's important to give the back of the shield an edge trim too. If the shield has a studded metal edge on the front, that edge would wrap around. So I paint the edge of the backside in black and then do a boltgun metal layer on top of that.





On this pic you can see the difference between painting on an edge on the back (to the left) and not (to the right). Need to fix that!

What Phreedh said. Do it to flat spear shafts and other non-textured wood surfaces as well.

Actually, Phreedh's examples of this are very good - especially on Julia's shield (3rd from the bottom) - note how the wood grain goes in different directions on the leftmost board compared to the others. Its little things like that that make it unecessary to do any scoring. Its easy and its good practice for painting straight lines.

If you want to make it really orcy, you could even have different coloured planks and use the same method for blue or red 'painted' wood.All of this texture has been painted on:

On second thought, I think that shield is actually textured Gaj! Removed from the list.

I think yours is a great example too, it wasn't until I read that it was all painted on texture that I actually reacted to it and looked closer. At first glance, it looked like a nice drybrush job.

Thanks for all that lads, plenty of inspiration.

Phreedh - Which one of the 3 is Julia, and do you name all your goblins?