Yeah, more than a little late. I know.

My last two March models for Ann’s “Neglected But Not Forgotten” March(!) painting challenge are another two Zombicide Survivors: “Ross” (John Goodman as Walter Sobchak: The Big Lebowski) and “Phil” (Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes: The Walking Dead)

Once again it’s one “normal” surivor for each of the two as well as one “Zombvivor” – or a zombified version of the character. We never used those rules, but they were pretty much added to let players who had been killed keep playing. When we were playing a lot of Zombicide in the past, we just played with however many survivors the scenario called for and doubled up when there were more survivors than players – and then we would just hand off a character if someone was unlucky enough to die.

I guess they make for some characterful zombies, though! Having painted Walter Sobchak, I now obviously need to paint The Dude, and while I do have that figure, it’ still boxed and will have to wait until I complete all of my other loose Zombicide survivors first. The nice thing is that with this latest push, I am slowly getting through the opened models what has become a noticable way.

Walter/Ross was a fairly pleasant one to paint and not too hard on the motivation. Lots of naturalistic earth tones and really the only tricky part was making the nice little sculpting of his glasses line up to the way that paint works. I also used a little transparent yellow and water effects in an attempt to create functional looking shooting glasses, and it kind of sort of worked out kind of okay.

Then of course we have Phil, one of the starting characters from the original Zombicide set, and one that appears to be (sorta-)loosely based off Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead. I still haven’t started watching TWD, you understand – mostly because there’s SO much stuff out there to watch these days! But like “Doug” (Michael Douglas from Falling Down) Phil has a generic enough look that they could slip it through the “kickstarter exclusive homage” and get him into the core retail box without licencing or IP issues which I”ll add a brief discussion about at the end of this post.

Since finishing the models and getting these pics together for the blog post, I’ve noticed that Grimes from the TV show has a stripe down the line of his trousers, so I’m in two minds on whether to return to the figure and add those in later. I guess we’ll see how bad my OCD gets… I also made a nice effort to get his shoulder badge with its shield and star looking nice, so naturally I forgot to highlight that in the photos.

I mentioned a little bit of IP drama with CMoN’s campaigns due to likeness rights during “Zombicide Invader”. Even their original artwork which was originally pretty obviously “inspired by” line art mostly flew under the radar.

That same line art had already gotten them into trouble at least once – with “Eva” (you guess who that’s supposed to be) and Miramax gave them a slap on the wrist. I also believe the Not-Samuel.L.Jackson art from the same campign that was a little too Pulpy – if you get my drift.

But even with these little hiccups, CMoN managed to keep on going along with nary a problem in sight, mostly by keeping the “inspired by” characters to their limited release kickstarter campigns, they kept under the radar. As such, they kept getting bolder with their artwork. I’m really not sure how they thought that they’d keep maanging to get away with it. I mean, they have some damned talented artists working for them, but the artwork was also getting pretty on the nose. And so, Mr.Smith up there got hit.

And I have to ask you – did they need the art to be that much of an accurate repaint of a film promo photo for the miniature I’m showing here? I don’t think so. And so.. yeah, the character of Dr.White/Will Smith got pulled entirely. Tina and others still made it through, though.

Since then, they’ve dialled it back again to line art. And the truth is that a decent line art caricature still gets across who someone might be inspired by, and lets those of us who do really enjoy our “homage” models in our silly board games still have them without such a severe risk of having them pullled due to an artist showing off just how well they can recapture a photorealistic photo of a celebrity or movie character.

I’ll have my round-up post up tomorrow, which will have a nice little collection photo of all the stuff that was Neglected but Not Forgotten that I managed to complete in March – which was all of the models – with the exception of the one model I bought and painted in that time. This post and the round-up were both planned to be put up over a week ago, but the photos I took all turned out to be hot garbage. I’ve since then had some other stuff on my plate and now have managed to fiddle with the settings on my new phone to get photos that are more than a little bit better. They’re still not as great as I’d like, but they’re certainly ones I’m happy with posting!