Zombicide: Black Plague heroes ride again

 Oh yes, we're back with more. Sorry. From left to right it's Redcap Rodney, Antha, Lady Grimm, Ariane and Persephone.

Antha, Rodney and Grimm are from the Marc Simonetti range, and Ariane is just a generic character from the Wolfsburg expansion. Persephone is from the Carl Critchlow range. 

Everything here is a one hour speedpaint, apart from the axe on Redcap Rodney which was me trying to create an effective NMM that can be used quickly. You can see the lessons learned from that on Persephone on the right hand side as I've tried to be high contrast without any technique.

 

Are they well painted? No, I'd say it's a reasonable tabletop quality which is fine when working through a large set of models that just need to look fine on the table. I have tried to focus on features that will make them interesting to look at. So weapons and armour on the front three, and upper clothing on the back two. Everything else is very, very quickly painted. Making these decisions at the beginning helps to speed up the process, and I'm being more effective.

A footnote. I forget on a regular basis which platforms I've posted pictures to. These models were finished a fortnight ago, and I posted them on Bluesky and didn't do it here or Instagram, or other platforms. I'm not a daft chap, but it's the pleasure of the painting that has me in the hobby, not the need to post online for clicks. I just enjoy sharing my work ... when I remember! 

Zombicide: Black Plague heroes redux

So what's been painted over the last year? Quite a few things. I remain mediocre at photographs, but here's a little group shot of the Zombicide heroes painted to-date. There's been an accidental focus on a lot of blues of late. Unintentional, but what I happened to have on the palette at the time.

  

A few of them were done as speed paints for a one-hour challenge on a painting Discord I'm part of. It's great to concentrate the mind in frantic action. I found that painting a couple in the same evening helped to get a feel for the colours on the palette and what areas to focus on.

 

 

 

 In addition, I've spent a little longer trying to produce an effective-at-scale NMM for tabletop. I don't want to spend too long on these, because it's literally for gaming and throwing around a table with the kids, and it's going to take a beating. But it's fun to see what works.

 

Milo, Xuya, Klom & Bob

Over Christmas we played a lot of Zombicide: Black Plague. It's beeen a favourite of mine for years, but the kids are old enough to play and enjoy it now too. Through the year I'm aiming to paint the heroes we play to a tabletop level. Nothing fancy or too precise, but just better than bare plastic - so a couple of hours at most on each piece, and approximating the card art.

Wolves, wolves, wolves - final groupshots

Well here we are - all the wolves from Zombicide: Black Plague, Conan, Blood Rage and 40k finished up! Phew. Here are the full group shots of everything.

That's a total of 40 wolves, and I feel vindicated in my decision to paint them in two large batches using the same techniques but different colours. It adds enough variety to not feel monotonous, and that's just what I wanted - so this has been a great success. They've also served a purpose as a useful palette cleanser between other, more complex pieces too. Would definitely take this approach again, as there's enormous satisfaction to see more figures leave the pile of grey and join the painted ranks.

Wolves, wolves, wolves pt.2

The second large tabletop-quality batch of wolves - covering Zombicide: Black Plague and Conan.

Again, there's nothing complex here, just block painted to get them in our games soon as possible. I make no apologies for the liberal use of blood - thanks to various mixes of Tamiya X-27 Clear Red and purple ink.

More figures that can move from the "to do" to the "completed" list and adding that little more character to our Tuesday night gaming sessions. Marvellous.

Wolves, wolves, wolves

Crossing a couple of games here, but it would feel a little repetitive making multiple posts on the same topic.

I'm painting wolves. Lots of wolves. Many wolves.

Doing inventory over Christmas on what needed painting and realised I had wolves from several different games - Zombicide: Black Plague, Conan, Warhammer 40,000 and Blood Rage. It occurred to me that if I painted them in two groups - grey and brown, it could give nice variation on the game boards. This is the first batch of the greys for Zombicide and Conan.

It's not a complex formula. Undercoated black, airbrushed grey, then a lighter grey, then heavy washes, then pick out a few details and add eyes. Done! Been a while since I just bashed out tabletop quality units, and after the brain melting complexity of the Hasslefree figures, it was a welcome change of pace - throwing the painting into automatic and just getting something wrapped up.

Zombicide: Black Plague - Runners

Continuing my plan of having a fully painted tabletop game, here are the Runners from Zombicide painted up, all fourteen of them.

Runners are fantastic pieces in the game and by the simple virtue of having two actions instead of one, they make you rethink a number of cunning plans as they can be on you considerably quicker than expected if they gain an extra activation from the card.

Despite them being great on the table, I didn't enjoy painting these and think it shows. Not happy with them, but want them gone. Couldn't tell you the reason why I didn't, as the sculpts are perfectly fine, but I've literally dashed through them and feel glad they're off the desk and on to the board.

The original plan was to have different base colouring for each monster type, but after a little thinking I've opted to paint the base rims red, same as the Fatties. I realised it's easy to distinguish between Runners and Fatties, and as there'll inevitably be expansion boxes, having the monsters from the core game with the same base colour probably makes more sense, so if they release a box of toxics they'll get green and so on. The vanilla Zombie Walkers, Necromancers and Abominations will get boring black bases. Mmm, vanilla.

What's next? Well, I'm finally biting the bullet and finishing up my last two Fishermen for Guild Ball - about a year after starting the project. After painting a lot of tabletop quality recently, I'm looking forward to doing something a little more complex!

Zombicide: Black Plague - Fatties

A more productive January than I thought it would be, so here come the Fatties!

They're not all in perfect focus, but I'm sure you get the gist :) One of the figures, poor grey chap in the middle row, suffered from me varnishing him in low temperatures this morning before adding blood for the photos yet the others weren't affected.

Alas, my magnifying lens and light on an extendable arm fell apart this morning so I need to fix it or source a replacement in order for me to pick out tiny details. It was instrumental in finding teeth, stitching and eyes on these figures.

Colours blocked in, lots of shading and washes, purple shading on the skin as they didn't look ill enough, then couple of details picked out with highlights (ropes, eyes, teeth, ropes etc.) and much blood applied - so these are quick and dirty paintjobs, literally! I want to keep them grimy in contrast to the upcoming hero figures who'll be a little brighter. The flowers are there because ... who doesn't love flowers?

I'll start on the Runners next with the goal of having those completed in February.

Zombicide: Black Plague - painting begins

I've started into the Zombicide: Black Plague figures this week. Nothing finished yet, but here's the first WIP of tabletop level paintjobs.

If you haven't played Zombicide yet, it's a co-operative boardgame where it's you versus the board in various missions with relentless waves of zombies joining the battle each round, and you have to find the balance between completion the missions and re-killing the undead. Marvellous fun, 2-3 hours for longer games and a real hoot - glad I backed this version, and there'll be quite a few additions over the coming months. Pressure is on for getting the rank and file back on the table, as we've been playing this quite a bit since mid-December arrival so they need to be ready quicksharp for the next round of games incoming.

These represent the Runners (14 of 'em), Fatties (another 14), an Abomination and a Necromancer from the base box. The Walkers will follow later, as there's 30-40 of those buggers and even I'm not daft enough to take on that many figures simultaneously - a lesson learned from my Gretchin mob last year! When gaming, weight of numbers on the table becomes a problem and it's hard to distinguish who's what - so I'll be painting the base edges red for Fatties, and orange for Runners. Everything else should be evident enough not to require it.

I'm batch painting the Fatties and going for reasonably boring colours, so mid-range blues, reds, greys and greens. By working on a small group it means I can move reasonably quickly while adding a little variety in where the colours are used. There's more coming in a few months, so I'll repeat the trick with slightly different colours, but the hordes will be dull but legion. The bases have a little texture added using some Vallejo Sandy Paste - my experience of it so far? It's like a resin-based version of Polyfilla.

Shading down on the first fellow. Detail and highlights next, and possibly even followed by proper pictures! Few of the details are crisply modelled but not obvious to my eye on the first pass, so shadows before highlights gives me a chance of spotting them and painting them correctly. There won't be gore added to the zombies until the very last stage as they'll all be matt varnished on completion and I don't want that beautiful glossy blood effect dampening. It will also be my shameless opportunity to cover up any glaring errors with blood and calling it "characterful", in the same way I call my awful cooking "rustic" ;)