Well, how do I followup yesterday’s post? With Zombicide, I guess. I finished this pair yesterday – Red Cap Ben in both his living and Zombvivor forms. Ben comes from the Zombicide Karl Kopinski Special Guest Box that also included Angry Mary, who got painted almost three years ago …probably not far off when I started on Ben. It’s been awhile…
I wanted to try something a bit different for Ben’s pants. Going for both some splatter as well as bloodstaining. I think it turned out quite well, though the light colour of his trousers helped immeasurably. (If it were August, I could have counted that!)
Ben is… just some guy. We spent a bit of time when we first opened up that box speculating about if he was supposed to “be” somebody, or a reference to something, but nope. He appears to just be some guy who looks slightly backwoodsy and slightly homeless – but appears to be pretty well set for zombie survivalist expeditions. I might have gone for a machete rather than a hatchet (or better yet, both!) but I see the practicality of having an axe in a survivalist setting. Firewood doesn’t chop itself, after all.
I need some new brush-on varnish, as his jacket and backpack have turned out a bit more shiny in the photos than IRL. I’ll probably need to bring him back in and do that as a touch-up. You know how this stuff really stands out in the photographs when the figure is blown up so much! You can kind of make out the blood trail and the smearing of blood on his base, though until I get a tripod for my phone (sadly, my new camera’s phone is now better than my Canon camera at miniatures photography!) – so I’m taking photos with the phone on the table (mostly) rather than elevated.
Finally, I thought a comparison shot was in order, using a Space Marine – which is a handy guide for most people (yeah, not everyone!) to give a sense of scale and size for many of these boardgame figures I’ve been working on over the last month. Height-wise they’re much the same (taller even, once the bases are taken into account) but much more realistically proportioned, and what we call “truescale”. Which means annoyingly tiny heads when it comes to eyes and all those other small details. Oh, and I’ve heat-reset the Zombivor’s warped/bent shotgun several times. It just keeps going back…
If you’re planning on submitting a model for the Jewel of July Community Challenge, get them in ASAP – you’ve still got a couple of days to get the model done, and then a couple more to get them photographed and posted. Please ensure your model’s post(s) are linked to the comments in there so I can find them. Trust me, even if I’ve read and commented on your models, I’ll still bloody well forget when I’m sitting here assembling the post. Happened in the June Round-Up, it’s happened before then and it’ll happen again.
The next two days (June 30 and 31) should be Marouda’s and my own entries for the Painting Challenge/Contest of The 1,000,000 Visits to the Temple over at The Temple of Morikun. The deadline to which is the 31st of July.
Following that I have three more (so far) of my own July models to share, as I had a nice productive spurt yesterday morning after a couple of days off, and we’ll see if I can finish anything additional in the final two days. Then my own July Round-Up & my Jewel of July Round-Up, then the Jewel of July Community Round-Up.
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
I think you’ve got those effects spot on! Overall, a nice pair of minis, like ’em!
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Cheers mate! 🙂
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Yep, very cool mate – you’ve nailed the blood effect perfectly I reckon! Don’t Marines look daft in comparison!
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I still like my heroic scale marines, but they don’t pair well with truescale models, do they?
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I actually kind of like the heroic scaling for Marines next to truescale models for normal Humans. I think of it as highlighting just how much all their implants and mods and extra organs end up pushing them away from a normal human form.
Now, heroic scale normal humans next to truescale normal humans (i.e. Catachans next to something like these Zombicide figs), that just looks weird and awkward.
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The problem as ever was with the fact that original Space Marines weren’t seven or nine feet tall, but were pretty much just enhanced, large-but-normal humans. S4, T3!
So each successive iteration of the models (sans Primaris’ hard reboot of sorts) has kept backwards compatability with the range immediately previous to it – so today you can see the obvious scale creep between a Naismith metal original and a current plastic Blood Angel, they’re still based on the “normal” human height.
Abominations like the Perry Plastic Catachans just make it all worse. Well, *they* make almost everything worse…
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Yeah, GW’s half-assed approach to the ways and degrees that they’ve chosen to maintain consistency with their older lines certainly hasn’t helped at all.
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lol – no, they don’t 🙂
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Nice Zombies. Not sure if it’s of interest but searching for some zombies to accompany a diorama featuring “Dynamic Ray” (if they ever get him back in stock!) I found this site, link below. I bought a couple of horror figures for a diorama I recently done and the quality was very good. Ì particulalry liked Characters VII featuring zombie Elvis and Marylin Monroe!
https://www.studiominiatures.com/shop/zombies.html
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Ah yes – I have a decent bunch of Studio Miniatures’ survivors and a ton of their plastic kit civilian zombies and Nazi zombies. There’s a pile of their “character” zombies that are on my “one day to buy” list as well!
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Very nice, man! Even without the blood, you can immediately see something is up with the difference in skin tones. Ok, so is “blood staining”, a new technical trick or is it mainly some blending and splattering going on there? Either way, looks sweet.
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Thanks mate – the bloodstaining was trying to get a stained effect on the clothing without making it look like it was simply painted with gloss red. The toothbrush-spatter works sometimes, but can sometimes give spatters that are WAY too bloody big due to the thickness of the paint (see Zombie Ramsey for a few examples of that). So I did fine (as possible) dots with a detail brush and let those dry to provide smaller and more controlled spatter, and then applied diluted BFTBG in several layers to try to give the pants a duller-but-bloodstained look.
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It definitely paid off!
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