Zomtober 2023 Week 2

Another week, another deadline met! This week’s submission is pretty much a proof-of-concept for this year’s theme, or ‘can I transform salvaged beastmen minis into suitable zombies in the style of the novel Zombieslayer’. And I think the answer to that is yes:

It’s a gor body with the head and hand snipped off and replaced with a beastmen skull and a zombie hand (from the standard topper in the old zombie regiment kit) respectively. The skull bit was originally from the dryad kit I believe, and was covered in vines that needed carefully snipping and filing off. A little green stuff and voila, gaps filled!

While I had the green stuff out I decided to hack a slice out of his gut and model on some tiny insides spilling out from under a flap of skin, as it feels like every good Gotrek and Felix novel has at least one enemy taking a wound to their abdomen and their intestines are described as ‘looping out’. 

Brief aside - zombies go on 20mm bases while gors usually live on 25s. I wasn’t sure the body would fit on the smaller base size, but I think with some careful positioning he should rank up alongside his fellows.

Then it was time for a fairly straightforward paint job, although I couldn’t resist adding some texture to his loincloth to add a little visual interest. My original plan was to have the skull entirely drenched in blood (as I always feel like zombies having any fully skeletal bits feels a little odd and out of place), but in all honesty I quite likes how the bone and horn came out so I ended up only mostly dousing him in blood. It looks so fresh and shiny in the pictures because it’s literally still wet in the pictures…

So, as you might have extrapolated from this and other posts, I managed to acquire a box of scrappy secondhand beastmen from eBay:

A mix of gors and ungors, in various states of disrepair. Some of them had been converted to hold marauder weapons, which I didn’t notice in the initial listing, but not the worst thing in the world as I’m only going to rip them off anyway. 

Acquiring these and painting one of them brings the Tally to:

29 vs 112 = -83

While the last two weeks have largely been a last-minute scramble to get things finished and photographed on the Sunday, I’m hoping that won’t be the case all month as I have the next two conversions already pretty much done. But then again, I’m now out of black spray. And going to Germany in a couple of weeks. Last minute scrambles it is then…