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Review : Space Ork bodies from Micro Art Studio

Due to some silly accidents recently (even after 20 years of using a craft knife its easy to slip...) my painting and scenery projects have not progressed as quickly as I had hoped, so to break the silence, something completely different.

A good friend of mine collects space orks and was keen to put together some nice looking freebooters/flash gitz for his army.  Thanks to Whitehorn's list of alternative suppliers, Jim (a member of this very website) was able to source an interesting selection of bits to create his flashy freebooters with.

Micro Art Studio, much like Maxmini, have a 'bits' section in their miniature catalogue and there's some excellent 40k stuff in there.  Inspired by Badruk's trenchcoat look, Jim discovered these great looking ork bodies.  Once they'd arrived, I was able to get some shots of the parts for this review.

As you can see in the next 2 shots you get 5 different bodies in the pack made from resin.  The feet are attached to a pretty large block of resin which will likely need to be removed to make use of the figures.

This presented the first challenge as some of the boots are almost flush with the resin block, so cutting or sawing around the feet was difficult.  I'm embarassed to admit that a couple of ankles did snap in the process of trying to remove the blocks, however the breaks were exceptionally clean so glued back together with almost no visible sign (something you dont get with plastic or metal in my experience as they tend to bend at bit at the point of the break).  So first point then - be prepared for having to do this work, but if it does go wrong its far from the end of the figure.

Having tidied the feet up, the ork bodies were based so we could compared sizes.  As hoped these orks are easily a match for Ork Nobz, given the stats of a flash git, they need to be bigger than a normal boy.

To get a feel how well these bodies work with other standard GW ork components, here's a series of mock ups using both Nobz and Boyz bits.

Standard boy bits, still looks mean!

Boy bitz and a Nob head, waaaargh!

Is it a Mangalore from 5th element?

The orkinator

You can hopefully see from these mock ups that largely the parts fit quite well onto the bodies and a selection of poses and parts do give some variety.  The bodies themselves are nicely detailed, I particularily like the jackboots.  The resin does have the occasional bubble which ought to be filled in and there are mold lines and flash, especially around the end of the cloaks/start of the legs.

Now this isn't the end of the work to building the freebooters, however someone else has beaten Jim to the conclusion, using exactly the same parts (great minds think alike?).  This post from Warseer (scroll down) shows what Hellbrandt Grimm was able to achieve using these bodies and also heads and big shooters from Maxmini (which Jim is also using).

Overall, Jim was very pleased with all the parts he bought and apart from the block of resin on the feet they weren't hard to work with.  One thing that is worth noting is that for more dynamic poses you'll find ork arms don't lie flush with the bodies so you'll need to get some green stuff out.  GW ork heads fit on very easily, however the Maxmini heads have necks so you'll need to do some modelling there (more on that if we review those parts!).

Well that's it for now - if you like orks and enjoyed this article let me know, we'll see if we can't get more greenskin related info on MyWargame if the interest is out there.