So I painted some zombies…

Today’s unweildly-titled post shows the first half of the Berserker Runner Zombies from the Prison Outbreak standalone expansion. The colour scheme of prison orange and cooked-lobster red carapace pretty much follows the same one I used on the Berserker Abominations and then the Berserker Fatties. It’ll certainly keep them easily distinguished from the other Zombie variations!

I’ve been flat out with work, and in my spare time, pretty much concentrating on getting these models done. They’ve certainly been a slog, but it’s been pretty rewarding (and a bit unreal, to tell the truth) to get so many of these walkers painted so quickly. While it’s certainly true that these aren’t exactly sexy model blog content, they are very much useful models for our actual tabletop games, especially given that we got up to the stage of using the Berserkers in our little campaign. That’s also why I haven’t posted anything for October yet – three or four posts of “here’s more Berserker Walkers” wouldn’t exactly be scintillating content, so when I found I was actually getting through them at a decent rate, I decided to simply hold off on posting them until I had all of these orange-jumpsuited prisoners completed.

I realised after the September Round-Up that I hadn’t actually given the second batch of Berserker Runners – painted last month – a post of their own, so I decided to roll them in with these Prisoner-themed Berserker Walkers, and then of course I held off posting until I had all of those completed as well…

These ones are a different sculpt to the first ones I painted and posted. While the first batch are doing a kind of jaunty jog, these ones look like they’re going hell for leather… and probably about to trip and grate a layer of three of themselves onto the asphalt.

So this month pretty much the only thing I’ve been working on so far (despite Dreadtober and Orktober) has been a drive to get these Zombies painted. Last weekend I got a dozen of them to completion, and between Thursday night and Sunday this week I’ve been been working on these orange bastards. Usually at the end of the week I spend time catching up on comments and other people’s blogs, but this week it’s almost exclusively been working on these (and playing a few games of Zombicide) – so I’ll do my best to catch up on people’s blogs next weekend. They do make a nice first entry for Dave Stone’s Apocalypse Me painting challenge running in October!

Despite the simple, repetitive paintjobs, I tried to vary the four sculpts (two male, two female) a reasonable amount by using different skin tones and hair colours. Of course, all you really see once completed in a mass like this is a sea of orange with bits of red (carapace and blood) but I did pick out things like eyes and teeth on these. More to satisfy my own mild OCD then any other reason – it’s like drilling gun barrels! Here in Australia, we don’t typically use the bright orange jumpsuits for inmates, I just went with the artwork’s style – and besides – bright orange models are far easier to pick out for gameplay purposes than more local prison greens and blues. Also why I’ve given my berserkers bright red carapace.

So with this burst of concentration and effort, I managed to complete all of my Zombicide “Prisoner” Berseker Walkers – 42 models in all (plus another errant Runner that we found bringing it to 43) – inside 2 weeks. I’m pretty happy with that. The process became less and less pleasant the further into it I became, but I’ve now come out the other side and they’re all done! Well… almost done. I still have another 14 Berserker Walkers on the painting desk – though these next ones are the Prison Guards/Corrections Officers/Screws, so they’ll have their own distinct paint scheme from these prisoners.

Why the huge Zombie/Zombicide focus lately? Well, we’ve gotten back into the campaign that we started at the beginning of the year, and have been (re)playing our way through the Prison Outbreak missions.

The plan is to play through every single piece of 1st Edition Modern Zombicide content that we own (plus the DLC missions) before moving onto 2nd Edition.

Now we have played through much of it 2-3.. maybe 4-5 times for some missions – but there’s also content we have barely used (Crowz), not used much (Zombie Dogz) or at all/even opened the shrinkwrap to (Very Infected Persons, Rue Morgue, Angry Neighbours – and a ton of addiitonal survivor boxes). For some time now, we’ve only added additional survivors to the roster once their models are painted.

So I just figure that it’d be nice to finish all of the Bersekers so that we could play at least a couple of the Prison Outbreak missions with all of those models completed. Of course, the lack of bread-and-butter regular walkers (60+ models) being painted is something that’s going to be a long slog with all of the other “specialist” zombies to paint – VIPs, then Toxic Zombies, then Dogz next, plus more survivors – but it’s easy to see from the shots of our game earlier this week how much the game’s aesthetic is improved by painted models. Those orange walkers are now completed – mixed in in the pics at the top of the post, and the white ones (guards) now have their uniforms done, and I’m working on base coating their flesh.

To be frank, I simply never considered that I’d paint all of the zombies for the game due to their sheer numbers, especially given all of the extras I picked up from various sources – but now I’m thinking it’s not only achievable, but something worth the time to actually get done. Once I have the last of the Berserker Zombies painted (next weekend?) I’m thinking I’ll take a group shot of all of the Berserkers – Walkers, Runners, Fatties and Abominations. I’ve got some Mantic chain-link fence terrain somewhere, too. If I can find it, I should try to get that painted this month as well!