I've not played a huge amount of Warhammer for a while, but a couple of my friends decided we should fix this for 2013 with a slow (continental drift slow) grow "tale of 3 gamers". My friends have limited time for painting, so the plan is to play 500 point games of Warhammer, once a month. Each month we will increase the army size by 20 points and everything must be painted to be fielded.
I've had a largely painted set of Warhammer armies for some time, Wood Elves, Skaven and Vampire Counts. What I haven't done is spruce these up for years, all of them are really inconsistently based and in need of a fix-me-up. I can't seem to shake my undead fixation, so dispite some misgivings about using them at 500 points I chose them. For reference my friends are using Goblins and Lizardmen, I'll see if they let me take some shots.
So after the first month, I found that my zombie summoning power was seriously dented by the fact I only had 27 painted. Here's the shot of them in all their shambolic ruin. Not based, not finished, this motley crue has been in this state for something like 7 years, from 2 army books previous when zombies were reasonably worth taking.
Operation: Pimp my zombies was kicked off. I've been sitting on 60 odd GW zombies for ages but recently got some of Mantic's excellent minis (30 to start with) in hope that I'd be inspired to paint a more suitably sized mob. For the GW mob, some rebasing and choice painting was all that was needed to get them ready for the table. My key discovery recently here is the wonder shade Anthonian Camoshade - seriously douse any figure that needs to be a bit drab over a base coat and your rank and file are done (works with skaven and all manner of swamp folk fantastically). So here we see a GW spruced up and a comedy half zombie from the Mantic sprue - useful where some of my zombies are overreaching themselves a bit!
As there's so many of the damned things I was keen to try some regimental basing for the zombies. My goblin using friend had a few spare, so here are the results of these experiments. I've added a gravestone to a couple of them for fun.
I really like the Mantic zombies, so much more dynamic than GW's and a very good price too.
I did add a few more GW zombies to the unit as well as few solo Mantic shamblers. All of the new additions were base coated in a strong (but unpleasant) skin tone, light greens, greys, light browns and a yellowish variant. Next loincloths and other assorted clothes were added in darker colours, greens and browns typically. A fairly liberal coating of dark red was added to assorted viscera and wounds and the teeth picked out. This is all hit with camoshade and we're largely done. I've added some brighter red blood to the more dangerous zombies where they've managed to find a meal and made everyone's eyes glow a selection of unpleasant colours using Tausept Ochre as a base, then a bright yellow plus optionally a shade if I wanted a really odd colour, blue or something.
So here's the entire unit of 48 ranked up - the standard and musician are frankly ancient lead GW figures, which while nice, fall over all the time so I need to sort those out. I could use a banner too.
Here's them again without the flash - not sure there's much new to see but some of the colours show up differently. The bases are simply sand stuck on with PVA (under and overcoated to stop it coming off) painted dark brown then drybrushed with medium brown. Finally some some more PVA to glue random clumps of flock were added - I like the idea my undead are attacking over broken earthlands.
To finish, here's a complete army shot of the forces I've previously posted on this blog - essentially my most recent undead additions to my army and all consistently based. Use the labels on the right to see the detailed posts about my Wight Lord, Skeletons and Ghouls.
The idea is to add to this growing horde by updating my existing collection to a fresher state or paint some of the hordes I have collecting dust (including the other 42 zombies) - or more likely completely new stuff as the evil retailers out there realise that undead are clearly the coolest figures.
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