Fifty shades of Grey...tchin

 I guess by now you have already seen the new WH40K Edition box. It's of course a... homage to THE box. The mighty Second Edition box. Blood Angels and Orks in Armaggedon. What can I say, I'm pleased that this is a thing, but well, I cannot be at ease with those new minis.

Have you seen the Gretchins? Have you seen them? I'll try to elaborate my opinion:

 Stung as I was by this bad taste joke of a mini, I took the only rational path one can take, the only one left. The only one, I say.

To paint all the Gretchins I have unattended

 50 great glorious Gretchins!

I know that as soon as you have seen that pic you have already discarded any trace of words such as "rational", "logic", "sanity" and some other expressions that are meaningless to me.

Fifty indeed

The first decisions involved general appearance and palette. Of course I was deep into Red Era, I wanted these to match my Orks and there would be no point in painting them any other way. I doubted if I should paint them all in a coherent way or more in different patterns. I chose the first option, not to have a colour explosion. I thought I could keep them colourful enough, yet not over the top.

You get the idea

 The thing is that the Codex (if you have to ask what Codex I'm referring to, I'm afraid this might not be your blog of preference after all, sorry) allows units of 10-40 Gretchins. I have 50. Would it be better to have two 25-Grot mobs or just ignore the Codex and have a single glorious large mob of 50 Gretchins?

Well, though I'm biased towards the second choice, I am keeping my options open. Though they are essentially the same, I painted 25 with a black helmet and 25 with a red one:

Cousins

This way I can take any of both options, making them recognizable at tabletop distance if I need two mobs, but keeping them visually coherent if I prefer just a large unit.

Not so many after all, if you think of it

 OK. This was the hard part, the dull one. To get these fit. Oh, BTW, note to self: I have to buy an electric drill. Making holes manually on all those autoguns was... challenging.

But if you have been following this humble blog for some time now, you may have a righteous question, or at least the hint of an intuition. Am I suffering to have 50 identical minis? Or 25/25 identical minis?

No. A hundred times no.

You can see that I have presented them in rows and columns, and it serves a purpose. I painted different motifs on the helmets following the columns:

Five by five

Besides, I cheated, there are columns where I didn't paint anything!

Then the same process on the rows, but this time on the sleeves:

Only four rows, the fifth one is clean!

This way I have made sure that there are not two identical minis. All of them are slightly different, if just by tiny touches here and there.

Now my soul is in peace with the universe.

I added a few random checkers here and there, just for fun, and to add more visual differences, but with no distinctive pattern this time.

You can say I got wild with that, huh?

The keen eye may have spotted a different Gretchin among the crowd. Right, in fact I only got 49 plastic minis, the fiftieth one is this metal Grot:

The Waldo of Gretchins

 Time to show some group shots. First the black helmets:

With Waldo the Gretchin

Then the red ones:

The closest to Red Era I could get

 What about having them all together?

50 Gretchins walk into a battle...

 The last pic includes a fat leader, the not-Grom I painted long ago, because you always look better when you take a pic next to someone fatter than you.

I insist, they are not that many...

Well, this has been quite a trip through the Valley of Insanity, but in the end I think they got the right vibe. I should really see what Ork stuff I have painted by now and build a proper 2nd Edition army list...