It’s been a little while since my last post. As predicted, October has been a pretty brutally busy time at work – as it is every year. As a result, my grand plans to paint Orcs/Orks and Tanks and a few Dreadnoughts for painting challenges have fallen by ther wayside. Not helped of course by hurting my wrist last weekend moving bikes around, so not much painting there either. It also means less time for reading blogs, but c’est la vie.

I have finally managed to complete the last batch of Berserkers from the Zombicide 1st Edition Season 2, Prison Outbreak standalone expansion. These ones being the Prison Warders – or the Prison Guards, or the Screws – so that’s a nice thing. I looked up various Prison Guard uniform types on the Google machine, and found that the various Australian ones look too similar to Police (blue uniforms), the British ones look like nothing in particular (they could be public transport workers!) with dark pants and white shirts and so I went with a made-up grey/green-grey scheme with a yellow pants stripe. It’s a bit “U.S. Sherriff-y”, but it gets the whole Uniform look across without looking too much like Zombie Cops. I also painted in a little shield-shaped patch to their shoulders and caps.

As with all of my other Berserkers, I’ve painted the carapace growths with a spotted “lobster red” look rather than the pale, off-white from the artwork. This, along with the yellow line marking stripes on the ground are to help them stand out as Berserkers in-game, and to unify these Warders with the Prisoners in their bright orange jumpsuits. We’re currently replaying our way through the campaign and still have about 4 scenarios left to play, so we’ll actually be completing the run with all of the berserkers painted. I should do a photoshoot with all of the painted Berserkers, probably. Unfortunately, there’s still a million regular walkers (somewhere around 60) to paint, and so a fully-painted table is still something that will elude us for some time.

As always, I leant hard into using multiple skin tones for these models to give variation. It’s especially important if you want them to look slightly less like clones when you have 14 models with only two sculpts. I mean, they atill all basically look the same on the table, but that little bit of variety makes them look a little more varied, even unconsciously. The next models I’m trying to get through are… yes! – More zombies. I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but we’re actually actively playing Zombicide right now, so they’re going to see use on the table much more quickly (and often) than Space Marines or Orks or Sigmarites or whatever.

They do still make another entry for Dave Stone’s Apocalypse Me painting challenge running in October!