I realized that I never posted my complete army of Ice Orcs that I'd posted a WIP a little bit ago.
Here they are! Some of them definitely turned out better than others, but I had a lot of fun painting them up and I'm happy with how they look as a whole. I've only ever painted one other "army" of minis, and I used the same color scheme for all of them, thinking I needed to in order to make them look like a cohesive unit. It worked, but just as they were cohesive, they were boring.
I tried a different approach here, picking out a general list of colors (black, brown, tan, and gray) that fit the theme I was going for. For each orc's armor, I mainly stuck to the selected colors, but threw them on wherever I thought it would look good, not caring if the previous model was brown with black accents, black with tan accents, etc. I figured as long as they all used them same colors overall, the colors would tie themselves together.
The skin came out a little wonky, but if you've seen my other posts or comments, you'll know that was kind of expected. I'm pretty ass at painting skin tones, and used the orcs as a playground to hone the skill a bit. They still don't look great, but I'm getting better at things like highlighting muscles and shading skin folds and the like.
Anyways, sorry for the giant wall of text. Here's a few glamor shots, featuring my paladin from a few weeks ago.
Oh, I actually love your idea of some sort of marking to indicate they're of the same army. In the campaign I made these guys for, the orcs are being manipulated by a white dragon. It would've been so cool to have like a frosty blue-white slash going across their face or maybe like 3 white lines on the shields.
Brilliant advice. Thank you. If I ever get around to painting the fire orcs they might get a cool indicator because of you 😉