How the Orc and Fae chess pieces turned out

I painted these pieces relatively recently. I’d said no more, but then last November I saw these on Etsy and they looked so fun to paint that I added these two sets to my chess collection. So now I have seven sides. Humans, Dragons, Dwarves, Red and Green Goblins, and now Orcs and Fae. It took a while for the grey resin pieces to arrive from an Etsy seller in Poland, but they were worth the wait.

What I’m calling the Ferocious Fae were actually called Dwarves… but I already have a set of Dwarves, so I call them Ferocious Fae. The others are the Obstinate Orcs.

Significantly more detail on these two sets. Proportions are quite different and the painting took a lot more time. The orc pawns are a bit too wide for their two inch square tiles with their scimitars held out like that… but they are wonderfully warlike. The pawns on both of these sides are not passive beings. LOL

I glued each piece to a square washer to give them more heft. Resin is not all that heavy. I gave the Fae and Orc Queens a little more height with an extra washer or two.

When I was done (like I did with the other sets), I created a box to store the pieces in and added foam separators within to keep them from getting damaged. That is one part of art creation that is often not considered. How are you going to store it? One hates to put a lot of work into something and then have it destroyed later as it is lying about vulnerable to dust and breakage. As I’ve a background in package design, it is not quite the same challenge that others might consider it. It is always fun to write playful copy for the exterior of packaging.

Side note: the table that the chess pieces are on, was actually an avacodo green, octagonal table on a pedestal in a dumpster. It was marked with yellow and pink spray paint squibbles, and a lot of dried liquid nail. I suspect someone was using it as a workbench.

I drove past the dumpster in downtown Hollywood one morning. I thought, “That’s an interesting shaped table!” But I drove on to work.

Then that night, I saw the table in a grocery cart pushed by a homeless man a few blocks from the old mansion where I rented a basement apartment.

The day after that, it was sitting in pieces – base, pedestal, and top – abandoned in front of my house. It sat there overnight. The next day I figured it was fate and I pulled it into the garage. For a year, it sat in pieces. When I moved out, I needed a dining table at my new place – and it had to be small. I glued it together. I scraped and sanded off the liquid nail. Then I painted a faux burl wood finish on it. Folks think it was expensive, but only a bit of hard work. I love to make beauty out of things that were thrown away.