Zombicide: Green Horde – Hedges

Zombicide: Green Horde Hedges

I know that title sounds super-exciting, right? Basically, Wave 2 of my Zombicide Green Horde Kickstarter pledge finally arrived a week or so ago, and after having a look and poke around, I found that I’d ordered 2 sets of the 3D Plastic Hedges, as well as 2 sets of the 3D Plastic Obstacles.

Obviously, these will make games of Zombicide nicer looking (which I haven’t played in more than a year now – though to be fair we did play it weekly for a year or more). More obviously, these have a lot of potential use outside of the singular board game. Which even more completely obviously, is why I bought so many of the things.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

A Marine, Survivor and Reiksgard provide scale.

They looked pretty decent right out of the box – certainly good enough for boardgamers to enjoy. But that doesn’t cut it for us wargamers, so I sprayed them with a darker olive drab colour, then gave them a zenithal spray with a lighter green (both from my custom spray can collection). Marouda then told me that she didn’t think they were dark enough, so I decided to fix that with a dark wash. Since hitting 40 of these would use a bloody lot of wash (Athonian Camoshade, perhaps?) I decided to break out a couple of dropper bottles of my pre-mixed mediums and go the Les Bursley route of making my own – which is why I ended up posting Les’ tutorial here the other day.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

“Quantity has a quality all it’s own” – Uncle Joe (probably).

The first wash didn’t dry as dark as I would have liked, so I mixed up another, darker tone, and applied that to the lower-mid area of the hedges, and that seemed to do the job. Then a bright green drybrush, paint the rocks, dapple the rocks (I briefly considered the liquid greenstuff-dab technique to give them texture… but doing it on all those rocks across 40 hedges? – no thanks!

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

There’s a decent amount of coverage with the hedges alone. Add in fences, buildings and scatter and there’s a good chunk of table sorted.

So then I gave them a dark wash, and called it a day after nixing the idea of another drybrush and then weathering powders. Again – commonsense. There’s 40 of these bloody things, and nobody is going to be staring too closely at the rocks on their bases.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

Enough to make a Hedge Maze, albeit a small one!

Gloss spray varnish, let cure for a day, then satin spray varnish – now they’re done! When you see me talk about a “significant” amount of scatter terrain as a project goal shortly, this is the sort of thing I envision. A couple of these isn’t much, but this many is a worthy task.

Zombicide: Green Horde - Hedges

Pretending to be the Bocage…

What I like is the fact that they can easily work across many genres and locales. Modern, Historical, 40k, urban, rural and well-maintained gardens. I can even see them being used for 15mm Bocage hedgerows as needed, since those Normandy hedgerows are huge!

Small Scenics: Wizkids Keg Barrels and Uruk-Hai Siege Bombs

Uruk-Hai Siege Bombs, Wizkids Keg Barrels

Today we have a transitional post between May and June’s finished models, dealing with two small sets of scatter terrain, neither of which really warrant their own post. Let’s face it, they barely justify the one between them except that I’m making a point to post up everything I finish this year.

Uruk-Hai Siege Bombs

The first bits are a few more of the Bombs from Citadel’s Lord of the Rings Uruk-Hai Siege Troops set. I painted four of these a year ago (very close to the day). Not sure where they are now. I’m sure they’re somewhere very safe. And now I have four more. Exciting!

The second models are a trio of barrel kegs from Wizkids that I picked up very recently when ordering some other stuff and needed a bit more product in order to qualify for free shipping. So I got these.

Wizkids Keg Barrels

I mixed some browns for a dark-but rich, stained look to the wood. They should have use inside of any fantasy dungeon or tavern and in many a historical setting. Best used indoors, but I’m sure they’ll be fine if placed outdoors as well. In the end, they’re okay, I guess. They weren’t very good at all to paint, however.

The problem is here. They’re nicely-rendered 3d models – that have been turned into miniatures. They look nice and detailed in their rendered form on a computer screen. Unfortunately, all of those fine, subtle details just don’t come out when the things are produced at 28mm scale. The woodgrain on the sides disappears completely, and the space between the planks almost disappears as well. I have to say that as much as people like to shit on GW (often for any reason they can think of), one thing that can’t be faulted is their awareness of the scale these things are produced in, and the need for the detail to work in and for that scale rather than looking good on a 3D artist’s computer screen , blown up to 1000x the actual model size.

Anyway, they’re low-importance bits of scatter terrain. My four final completed models for May, and the first three for June.