Category Archives: General

What to Paint in December?

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I’ve been thinking lately. My painting has changed focus a couple of times this year. At the start it was simply to “paint models and maybe get an army finished” with a hopeful goal of getting 365 models painted in the year – which I’ve never managed to do. It then shifted to getting my Gondor Army (for KoW, etc) completed, then the Moria Army was added to that hopeful focus. Then it shifted to getting things that were started (often years, or even decades ago) finished before starting new units and projects. I’ve been reasonably happy with the way most of it’s all gone, but in a few weeks I’m taking some leave from work, so I’ll have pretty much all of December off.

I thought it would be a nice thing to paint something new/different/interesting/cool, to celebrate my holidays. The question is: What to paint?

I don’t really want to slot a unit of models or even a vehicle or Knight in here – I’d much prefer a cool character, or monster, or walker. Something I can enjoy, that can be a bit of something special and cooler than my usual endless Rank & File, but not something that’s going to be off-putting in terms of assembly like a vehicle or knight. Or scenery.

Old photo of far too many unpainted models.

I’ve got a LOT of models across a lot of ranges so there’s a lot of scope/potential for something interesting here. GW, Forge World, Warhammer Forge, Fantasy, Raging Heroes, Avatars of War, Reaper, Blood Bowl, Citadel-Oldhammer/Rogue Trader, 40k, Rackham, WarZone, Dredd, (just a little) WarmaHordes, Historicals…. so I reckon I’ll ask here, and then just disqualify any suggestions people make that are out of my scope or preference (Mantic or Reaper Bones models for example are probably not up to the level of what I want to have fun with doing as a special job.)

Any suggestions??

Who Let The Dogs Out? Zombicide Dog Companions

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I’ve been waiting ages to use that awful pun. I just had to finish the last of the six Zombicide dogs first.

Zombicide Dog Companions, American Bulldogs

Moog and Gapard, the American Bulldogs

The American Bulldogs were the first dogs I got finished. I attempted to pretty much match the dogs up to their appropriate artwork, but also did their collars and leads in slightly different colours so that players could have a secondary colour thing to latch into visually. Also, six black collars and leads would have been boring.

Zombicide Dog Companions, German Shepherds

Martens and Bismuth, the German Shepherds

After finishing the Bulldogs, the others sat on my desk for literally months until I managed to force myself to paint the German Shepherds. Martens is easily my favourite paintjob of the bunch.

Zombicide Dog Companions, Blue Heelers

Lucien and Cherry, the Blue Heelers

And finally, I finished the last of the Blue Heelers. I didn’t mind doing Cherry, the ginger-brown one, but Lucian was annoying as all hell to do.

Despite the fact that they all came up pretty decently, I really didn’t enjoy painting the dogs. I’m not sure why, but I kinda just lost interest in them after the Bulldogs were done, and at that point they became a chore. It might have been the smaller size, or perhaps trying to match the colours closely to the figures’ cards. I’m really not sure.

I’ve seen people clip the stands off the dog models and glue them directly to their bases, but my group tends to play Zombicide a lot, and as a result, all of the models get a lot of handling. This means they need to be and stay especially robust – no flimsy models wanted here, and if I did the clipping I’d be concerned that their leaping poses with few contact points simply wouldn’t hold up to the amount of play that we do.

They provide a very powerful buff in the game. Our group no longer really bothers to give the Dogs much in the way of commands or orders except for occasionally early on in the game if someone lacks a decent melee weapon. We also use them for the extra search action, but mostly we use them for the bonus dice to melee attacks. We’re about to finish the Season 2 campaign done vanilla-style, excepting the addition of a few extra survivors so the 4 of us can play with 2 characters each, but once that’s done, we’ll be combining everything together and there’ll be some really nasty melee-centric characters. 2x Claw Hammers with 2x American Pitbulls and the Gas Mask? 14 dice melee per action that can take out any number of Vanilla, Toxic or Berserker Walkers, Runners or Zombie Dogs and the Pitbulls’ damage of 2 as backup for Fatty duties? Ouch!