Painting & Weathering an Orky Jet: Part 2 – Paint

I’ve never been accused of being particularly bright. It’s not that I’m a complete idiot I suppose. But sometimes I get a bit “airheaded” to use a very old phrase that is probably cancel-worthy in today’s world. Having grown up in the 70s and 80s though, and hearing that phrase tossed about quite a bit, I’ve gotten to the age that I realize it describes me.

Go with your strengths, I guess…

The first time I heard the word “ork” (or maybe it was “orc”) was sometime back in the mid-seventies when I was in elementary school. I was hanging out with this kid from the neighborhood whose name has long since slipped from memory. Nice kid though, with a great collection of GI Joe toys, including that GI Joe “slide for life” tower that was so cool.

So we were playing GI Joes one afternoon, defending the world against whatever it was we felt was a threat. I was not much help, as I had one of those “Kung Fu Grip” Joes – which meant approximately 12 minutes after taking it out of the box his fingers broke off. He could help carry the firewood around, and wave his arms if needed, but don’t ask him to help pick up M&Ms off the floor. Anyway…

The kid had a bit of a speech impediment. Not severely so, but enough that his pronunciation of some words, combined with my aforementioned airheadedness, resulted in some misunderstandings that, looking back, are a bit funny to me now.

He was telling me all about some book he’d read that had these big, scary, humanoid type monsters in them. I was suitably impressed and slightly terrified, and I asked what they were called.

As I mentioned, he had a bit of a speech impediment. But quite often when he said something, instead of asking for clarification, I just went with what my brain thought I heard he said – not what he actually said. So he’d happily keep telling his story, and if I said it the way I heard it, he must’ve figured I was just saying it like him.

He told me of these things called “orks”. (Or orcs… or maybe even orques.) But what I heard was “Eric”. Well, more like “oruk”, but as I’d never heard of an “oruk”, I had heard of an “Eric”, and accounting for his speech impediment (but not my brain impediment), I went with “Eric”.

So our GI Joes began to wage war against the evil Erics. Happily we won each time we faced off against the chief Eric and his massively evil and dastardly army of Erics. And serendipitously there was a kid in the neighborhood named Eric who was a bit older, and he was kinda mean, so the evilest Eric of them all was… Eric. And thanks to our own unique difficulties, it made sense to both of us.

To be fair, he was thinking “Eric the Ork”, and I was thinking “Eric the Eric”, so… well, you decide.

Anyway, for years, I thought “orcs”, “orks”, and even “orques” were “Erics”. It was only several years later in high school when I was introduced to Tolkien by a far more literate friend that my error was pointed out. And by “pointed out” I mean I stood there feeling like a doofus while my dear friends literally rolled on the ground laughing because I thought the characters were called “Erics”.

Even today though, forty-plus years later, in my brain – I think of them as “Erics”.

Which brings me to the point of this blog.

Here’s a video about painting a model like a group of Erics would.

Paints Used