Zomtober Week 3 - And What, Post #100??!!

First and foremost, I can't even believe that this is blog post #100!? Madness! And it's even crazier to think I actually have people following the madness, so a huge thank you to everyone who has  subscribed, followed, commented, or stopped by the  blog - it's extremely humbling to say the least.

Mid-week I was feeling good about getting some painting done, so after I got my Universal Monsters all based up I got ambitious and grabbed the last 4 zombies from TWDAOW Prelude to Woodbury starter set and got them ready to get primed.

After watching a few more episodes of The Walking Dead (in a desperate attempt to catch up for the season 8 premier next Sunday, just finished season 4 today) I have decided that I am no where near the right skin tone for these zombies or any of the ones I've already completed. I primed these 4 with the AP Necrotic Flesh again, but I tried for a more gray or ash like color with thinned down gray paint and failed miserably.

The other huge problem I'm really having is "dressing" the figures. I can't pick clothing colors to save my life! Everything just ends up some kind of muddy brown earth color.

Maybe I need to look at a clothing catalog or something to try and find good matching color schemes for tops and bottoms. These two I tried a purple like color and a green color.

I will say the little details on these figures is amazing. The figure above for example has a broken leg and the bone is literally sticking out below her knee?! And each figure has also managed to lose a shoe along the way somewhere as well.

And a close up of the three new walkers, with one of my new police cars all weathered up. I got several police cars off Ebay for super cheap so I thought it'd be fun to get some abandoned cars on the table.

I added leaves from JTT Scenery to give it a bit more narrative. So overall happy to get three more figures completed, not happy with the skin tones at all though. I guess we'll just keep at it, maybe I'll get lucky eventually and find the right paint mixture.

I also threw together a pack of the 4Ground pallet sets.

These went together super fast and super easy.

The set comes with 3 large and 3 small pallets. Highly recommended for scatter terrain and back alley fodder.

Honestly I didn't think I'd get as much done as I did all things considered. Saturday has really been my main day to get up to the studio, I usually can get about 12 hours up there. But not this weekend. Saturday we had a party to go to for one of my wife's clients and then immediately after had to get the horses and trailer ready for her to take them to train for four days in Pennsylvania. The club we were at for the party had this really neat stone bridge over a stream and the whole time I'm there all I can think about is gaming scenarios with a stone bridge as an objective.

We got back to the barn late and got everything ready for the trip and had brought the dogs out with us.  Always leave it to the little one to find a blanket so sleep on no matter what - you can see it makes zero difference that it's a horse blanket.

Until next time, thanks for looking! And again, much thanks for following along through 100 posts.
Ivor

Studio Miniatures Classic Monster Figures

The very first miniature Kickstarter I ever backed was the Monster Madness Character Miniatures by Studio Miniatures - I can proudly say that my first ever Kickstarter was to help bring back Mystery Science Theater 3000 :)

I can't remember exactly where I stumbled across this Kickstarter but I absolutely love the old black and white Universal Monster movies, as you can see with my complete movie collections, and then when I saw they had two figures from the movie "Young Frankenstein" I was immediately in shut up and take my money mode, even though more than half of what I was going to receive with my pledge I had no interest in at all.

Ultimately I knew that they would more than likely just be display pieces and never actually make it on to the tabletop for a game. So when the figures arrived I knew I wanted them to have a grayscale paint scheme that would match that classic black and white movie feel. Not feeling the desire to pick up the paint brush at the time, I sent these across the pond to Arthur at EZ Painter Studio and he absolutely knocked it out of the park on what I had envisioned.

Getting into the case with those German zombies last week made me realize that these guys still needed based, so with some extra motivation that was this weeks mid-week project. I did my usual pins and clear bases for everyone.

The Monster and The Bride.

The Wolf Man and The Invisible Man - the details on his robe are amazing!

The Mummy and The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, and The Baron - Peter Cushing from the old Hammer horror films.

And my two favorites! Igor (it's pronounced EYE-vor - wait, that's how you pronounce my name) and Frederick Fronkenstein ! Just brilliant figures and brilliant brushwork :)

Working on some more of the Woodbury TWD zombies for the next post.

Until next time, thanks for looking!
Ivor

Zomtober Week 2

I'll be honest, I didn't think I'd get anything done this week. One fully painted figure is going to be considered a major victory in my eyes! And I'm actually super happy with the results.

I decided not to even attempt anymore of the Wargames Factory zombies (I do have an idea for them though, so at least they won't get tossed - stay tuned) so I grabbed one of the Mantic zombies from the Woodbury expansion set to try to paint up.

I primed him light gray, and that's when I saw a strange mold line that ran from his left should across to his right arm pit, I completely missed it when I initially took him out of the box. I say strange because of where it's at, usually your mold lines are along the side of a figure, not diagonally across the top of the chest, very odd.

So I took a file to get rid of it, and then sprayed some of the AP Necrotic spray paint lightly across the top of the figure. No need to spray the entire model really. Unfortunately though I didn't do a very good job on filing down that mold line as it popped back up when I painted the shirt.

After watching a few painting videos on You Tube it became very clear to me that Citadel's 'Blood For The Blood God' (honestly, who makes up these Citadel paint names lol!) was what I needed to improve the, for lack of a better word, gore, of my zombies. So I ran up to a local shop and grabbed a bottle, and I have to say it is exactly what I was looking for.

I was moving along pretty quickly so I didn't take any WIP photos!

I did a few washes with Citadel's Nuln Oil on the skin areas, and Drakenhof Nightshade on the shirt. 

Agrax Earthshade was applied to the pants. And I did a dry brush with some Vallejo Stencil to bring out the high lighted areas of the entire model. 

And a close up of the completed figure with his new clear base. One foot was pinned and then a hole drilled into the base to make the figure more secure - you can see a more detailed explanation of my pinning figures to bases at the bottom of this old post here

Even though I only painted one figure from beginning to end, I did finish some detail work and based all 36 of my West Wind German zombie soldiers. I'd had these done for a while now and they have just been sitting in a case. I was initially going to use them for Historicon back in July.

One of my early story ideas for the Agent Carter Historicon game was that once Peggy and the SSR found the entrance to Red Skull's hidden underground base they were going to come upon a failed experiment of German soldiers who had been turned into zombies and over run the entire facility.

I had several ideas for the underground base/lab, but I thought what could be really fun was some 'Ultimate Soldier' experiments gone completely wrong. And as we all now know, time unfortunately didn't allow me to complete the underground base, but all the pieces and story are all still there, so completing these figures is a great way to get back to finishing part 3 of the Agent Carter game.

The figures were all pretty much ready to go, all I had to do was cut off the metal from the bottoms of their feet and get pins inserted into them for the clear bases.

I added a few highlights, the new blood paint, and then finally used some Vallejo Sky Blue to dot some eyes onto all the figures.

And a close up of the herd. Really happy with these as well!

Just for fun, here's Peggy Carter surrounded by the entire herd :)

I mentioned in the beginning about thinking I wouldn't get anything done this week - we had a horse show which always creates extra work, I had to buy a new car which took two days to complete, but the big thing was I really thought Jakob would come home from school this weekend since he had an extra two days off. I figured he'd come home for 4 days and we could hang out and maybe even get up to the studio to roll some dice again, and even try out the Walking Dead - well, any thoughts that he may be homesick or is having trouble adjusting to life on his own at college were thrown out when he responded that he didn't want to come home because "...there would be nothing to do." !? Granted, he did say he had 4 projects he needed to continue to work on too, but gee whiz, gut punch! Kids, lol :)

Until next time, thanks for looking!
Ivor

Zomtober 2017

Well, all I can say is thank goodness I used some throw away figures for my first go at painting in what has been forever, lol! And thank goodness they were zombies, because the paint job turned out pretty awful - though I can attribute some of that to a bad product which I'll talk more about later.

As I mentioned in my last post I have joined in on the Zomtober painting challenge - here. I honestly can't remember the last figure I painted from beginning to end, it's been a full on focus of terrain for the entire year really. I definitely didn't want to use my new Walking Dead All Out War zombies for this first go, so I remembered that I had an old box of Wargames Factory zombies.

I think I bought them as extras for the board game Last Night On Earth. Anyway, I also quickly remembered why I never built them - I am awful at building multi part plastic figures, I just hate it lol!

I powered through it the best I could and got 8 built and ready to be primed.

I purchased some of Army Painter's Necrotic Flesh a week ago in anticipation of getting zombies painted up quicker. And I have to say I really liked the color on the models.

I just did really quick, for me anyway I'm still super slow with the paint brush, block painting on the figures as I knew I also wanted to try the Army Painter Quickshade on them - again, to get more zombies completed more quickly.

One thing I found interesting about the figures was the ones that looked like doctors - the coats are just awkward looking. And the Butch Deadlift/Bolt Vanderhuge figures with the monster sized chests were awkward too - dudes need to do some cardio and get off the free weights.

I've had this can of AP Strong Tone Quickshade for several years now, and hadn't opened it since I did work on my old west figures - so that's been about 3 years now. When I shook the can everything seemed ok, but when I actually opened it the top had completely solidified.

And it was thick too, probably about an 1/8 of an inch. I finally punched through that and stirred up the Quickshade for a good 10 minutes straight, but I could just tell it wasn't right.

And with some really bad judgement I went ahead and applied it anyway to the figures. Bigly mistake. But again, thankfully they are zombies and can look like doo doo.

I didn't use all the figures I painted because I thought some were just awful, but I did base a few that I had done years ago to get the six shown here for this first try. Like all my pulp figures I'm going to go with clear bases for all of these zombies and then all TWDAOW figures as well.

I've been getting a lot more boosters and expansions in for TWDAOW as you can see here.

So overall, a great big fail on my first attempt at figure painting, lol! But with sticking with stuff I'm kind of good at, I'm making great progress on 4Ground's Emma's Diner, with a zombie apocalypse twist :)

Until next time, thanks for looking!
Ivor