Category Archives: Modern Wargaming

Zombicide “Yuri” (Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer: 24) and “Dakota” (Pamela Anderson)

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Zombicide "Yuri" (Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer: 24) and "Dakota" (Pamela Anderson)

And here’s my next pair of Zombicide survivor …um, pairs.

Zombicide "Yuri" (Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer: 24)

First up, we have Yuri. Or as he’s likely much better known, Keifer Sutherland in his role as Jack Bauer from the TV Show 24. Despite having put painting him off for literally years followed by months, he was a pretty quick, easy and (dareisay?) fun model to paint.

Zombicide "Yuri" (Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer: 24)

Blue Jeans, black body armour, white t-shirt, blond-brown hair. Actually, his hair was both the most interesting and most challenging part of the model – as well as the most rewarding. Much like I spent time awhile back focusing on getting tattoos to look more natural, my focus as of late has been on getting hair on models to look both better and more natural.

Keifer’s hair is blond. As least the kind of blond that adult men tend to have. I’m not entirely sure if it’s more on the side of “used to be straw yellow as a boy and got darker with age” or “I’d like blonde tips, please” (nor do I care, really). The main point is that it’s a thing and I tried to capture it for the first time on this model, and while not perfect, I think it came out pretty decently regardless.

Zombicide "Dakota" (Pamela Anderson)

The second figure of the two is pretty clearly based on Pamela Anderson – and even though I haven’t followed her career closely, I can’t for the life of me find a film where she played a sexy prisoner. So I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. I’m neither a prude, and the current incarnation of “Wokeness”, complete with thought police and censorship of anything that might make someone feel slightly uncomfortable disgusts me (almost) as much as RWNJs do – but I really don’t see what they were going for here. I mean, I found a pic that might have been partial inspiration for this design:

But I do fail to see the obvious connection between Pam dressed skimpily for a night out/promo evening and the prisoner gear – mostly because the dudes who are actors in the series tend to be dressed for one of their iconic roles, as with Keifer, above.

Sure, a Baywatch bikini might be a bit much, but surely Barb Wire was enough of a thing to fit in with Zombicide, wasn’t it? (I admit, I’ve never seen it, but maybe I need to now). She’s still looking like Pam, still looking sexy in her own style, and, you know, it’s a role she played in a film written for her. So I think this one is (was) a bit of a miss on CMoN’s part. Not because “sexy chick bad”, but because do better with the actress’s likeness like you do with so many others. 

Zombicide "Dakota" (Pamela Anderson)

As with Keifer above, my own main focus of actual interest on this model – both the live and zombified versions – was on her hair and refining my ability to paint blonde hair that looks not like yellow paint slapped on, and something a little better than the “highlight ochre” that I’d gotten to. Once again, it’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it, and I think Pamela here wears my best attempt at long blonde hair to date.

A particular blog article that really inspired me to push myself further what it comes to hair is this one on the Bird with a Brush blog by the amazingly talented Wrenthebard. It’s certainly worth reading if you have any interest in painting hair.

Oh, and why did I paint the nipples in on the underboob model? Because they’re actually sculpted there, and if I’m going to paint the sculpt, I may as well do it fully. – I mean, it’s not really the same thing as one of those Eastern European sculpts of a Not-Imperial Assassin or Not-Adeptus Mechanicus hero with giant titties hanging out that you can actually carve the bumps off and paint as a black bodysuit pretty easily.

These four models of two heroes are my second set of submissions for the second annual “Paint the Crap You Already Own!” challenge. Making ten posted up so far!

Zombicide “Ross” (John Goodman as Walter Sobchak: The Big Lebowski) and “Phil” (Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes: The Walking Dead)

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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!