March 2021 – Personal Painting Round-Up + Neglected But Not Forgotten Challenge Round-Up

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After my slightly, then significantly lower than average output in January and February this year, March saw a return to something much more like the form I expect for myself in terms of the number of completed models.

Credit to both of the month’s community painting challenges that I took part in to help with my motivation. I’ve already discussed Swordmaster’s Monster March painting challenge. And I am so far behind in leaving comments that I still haven’t posted on Alex’ Fembruary challenge, let alone Swordmaster’s round-up post – and aplogies to both of those bloggers as well as everyone else who I’ve fallen behind in – including replying to those who are kind enough to leave comments here on my own posts!

Ahem.

My point is that regardless of my lack of being able to keep up with reading, commenting, replying or even (as you can see here) posting – I have still managed to keep painting which has been rather invaluable for me personally, and the challenges run by members of our wonderful little community have certainly helped to motivate me to get shit done and keep on painting – so thank you to you all!

Bascially everything in these photos, aside from the Nolzur’s Shambling Mound (which I forgot to remove for an extra pic) are my submissions for Ann’s “Neglected But Not Forgotten” painting challenge run through March. Well, technically, the Treeman, Iguana and Undead Flesh Golem are Marouda’s submissions, but I helped her with them, and I’m using that and the “couples clause” that I just invented to count those in the overall numbers for the monthly tally as well. Basically, I forgot to take pics of all the rest of them without her three, and then the rest of them without her three and also without the Shambling Mound. And all the models have now been put away to various places. There’s one thing I can do though….

Here’s Marouda’s Model trio, assuming that they count as neglected But Not Forgotten if one was given as a gift to paint over the 6 months ago, and the other two were owned by me more than 6 months ago yet pilfered by her to paint…

For a few other little pics, here’s the D&D models completed in March. I’ve kept her Treant and that Reaper Undead Golem thing out of this pic, going for more of a “pure” D&D set with these.

And here are the Zombie Apocalypse Survivors of March, all together. I think they’d probably be able to hold out well, except for the inevitable infighting…. perhaps that’s why four of them missed Fembruary?

Lastly, I’ll wrap with the Zombvivors. The unlucky survivors who were infected and turned…

Whups! Hit publish a second too soon. 45 figures for March (including the 3 Marouda’s Models. So adding those to the 43 from Jan-Feb brings the tally to 88 at the end of March. Not too bad and back on track. April has been productive so far as well, so I’ll be stacking up a few more multi-models posts in the next few.

….aaaaand that’s a wrap for March. Now onto April, where Ann once again has been running a painting challenge, this time the second annual “Paint the Crap You Already Own!” challenge. Which I like to think of as the “Slap Robin in the Face” challenge for some reason…

Oh, and someone in the Community – I’m thinking Roger? or perhaps Dave? – mentioned a challenge called Monster MAYhem that runs during (guess it!) May which I checked out at the time, but naturally I haven’t been able to find the link or post for the past couple of weeks… so I’m hoping the link can be reposted in the comments here? Pretty please? 😀

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!