In much the same way as I’ve grown sick of painting plastic Gondor dudes over the past few months, I’ve grown equally sick of painting Skeletons. As the time counted down for April, I happened to spot a pair of Zombies sitting randomly amongst the painted undead out in the War room. I’d painted the pair one weekend last year after seeing them randomly sitting on my painting desk, partly-done. So with absolutely no randomness this time, I grabbed out a couple of Mantic’s Zombie (and one Ghoul) sprues, clipped a few off, cleaned up the bits, and then assembled them, attempting to build as many unique figures as possible while bringing the total to 12. Not all that easy, as the Mantic Zombie sprue is pretty limited. The parts from the ghouls aren’t a terribly hard kitbash, but I did find that the kits weren’t designed with inter-compatibility in mind when they were originally tooled and sculpted. Mantic weren’t all that forward-thinking at the time, I guess.

Now, we all know that a mere dozen Zombies isn’t all that many, even when reprsenting “20” on a regmient base. I reckon I’ll slowly build up a tarpit unit of Zombies, a dozen at a time over the course of whenever I feel like painting more zombies. I know I could churn out a ton of decent looking ones very quickly via “the dip”, but somehow I managed to really quite enjoy painting that first pair last year, so I decided to paint them via brush instead.

Having said all of that, the Army Painter Washes did most of the heavy lifting. After basecoating the flesh in various mixtures of Vallejo Model Air: Sand, Aged White, Duck Egg Green and AP Camo Green and VGC Off White for flavour. Then AP Purple Wash, Green Wash and some Lahmian Medium. For the rags I continued with the “army palette” of dirty dark grey to stand in for black, rather than a more realistic various shades of brown. Once again, I mixed up some greys, this time adding Sand for the hightlight mix colour, so as to avoid a monochomatic grey. Dark Tone AP wash to finish off.

Next up was painting in the exposed bone and various bits of exposed muscle and offal, then lightening or blackening the edges of some of the torn flesh as I felt appropriate. Did the “lunch” portions of those who have been dismembered by the zombies in slightly “fresher” skin tones, and then did a little work picking out teeth and eyes and hair. I added a bit of bruised skin via additional brown-purple washes on many of the models, though it’s a bit hard to see in these particular images.

Finally, I matt varnished them, and once dry, went in for a bit of fun with the Blood Effect paint. In this case, Citadel’s Blood for the Blood God.

I think the most surprising thing about these guys was just how easy and more importantly – fun they were to do. So much that I’m tempted to start another unit of 12, which I’ll them be able to combine with these guys into a horde.

Here’s the traditional regiment shots. Another use for these models is to use them for Zombicide Black Plague. I’m tempted, but the fingers on them are pretty fine and fragile. When I was clipping and assembling them I’ve already managed to break a few off – so I just painted the stumps bloody – fits zombies, anyway – but with the amount of rough handling the Zombicide models get, it might not be such a good idea to use these guys in the game…