Zomtober 2018 week 4

And so, we find ourselves at the final Sunday deadline of this year's Zomtober, surprisingly having not once missed a posting deadline (he types, tempting fate). Thus, I present another six zombies, three at a time (because the pictures get even worse if I try to squeeze them all into one picture), which I think takes me to having painted one of every unique walker sculpt in my Walking Dead starter box bar the zombified Rick figure:

These three are fairly plain, and include the Limited Edition 'Ronnie' walker (the lad in the shirt emblazoned with multiple letter M's). I saw a picture of the actual chap that the sculpt is based on this week, and have no idea why I'd envisioned him as a redhead. Ah well, I still think it rather suits him...

Three walkers that I'm infinitely more pleased with - the first I love for the dodgy freehand on the vest; the second is a lovely figure, being from the Limited Edition Clementine & Lee Booster; and the third I love because despite a slightly odd facial sculpt (having a face shape not unlike a Necron) and appearing to be draped in a bin bag there's just something brilliant about it, and I thoroughly enjoyed painting it. I also went all out on painting texture on the jeans on this figure that is pretty much unnoticeable in these pictures (and real life), but hey I know it's there [he weeps].

Here's another angle on the deer-munching figure, as his hunched pose makes it a little hard to see when photographed with his pals:

Side Note: I haven't played any of the Telltale Games Walking Dead games, so don't really know the significance of this figure. I probably should get around to it one of these days...

But what's that, there's more?

Not content with just painting zombies for Zomtober, I wanted to try and add another Spawn Point to my collection to go with the ones from a previous year, to take my total up to four, which seems a better number for spreading around a table evenly...

My plan was to make a Spawn Point inspired by the mounds of bodies that appear in a Walking Dead app that I briefly played some time last year (might have been called Road to... something. I forget). Several levels had these mounds of bodies that every so often would wiggle and disgorge more walkers, and I quite liked the idea of trying to produce something inspired by them in miniature form!

I grabbed a base to match my previous ones, and set about cutting some cork to make a mound (in order to give the piece some additional height without having to use more miniatures that you wouldn't even see in the middle of the pile):

A couple of round bases made the perfect templates to give a regularly rising slope:

Although when I posed a miniature next to it, I decided that maybe it needed a little boost and gave it another layer of cork for height:

I popped a weight on top to hold it down while the glue dried (I started with PVA, but added some superglue when that took too long to set), and once it had, I applied some filler to smooth out the transitions between layers:

It was at this point that I realised that I'd grabbed the wrong tube of filler, having grabbed a tiling one that is more rubbery that that which I would normally use. Taking a Bob Ross like approach of 'happy little accidents', I figured I'd press on and see how it turned out.

I deliberated on whether to sand the base now (in order to make sure that there were no missed spots, as there might be if I tried to apply glue into the nooks and crannies between figures) or after I'd applied the figures (in order to make them look like they were slightly buried), and settled on the former. I didn't take a picture of that step, oddly, but imagine a slightly sad tiny wedding cake covered in sand and grit and you wouldn't be far off.

Now, for the bodies, I sifted through several boxes of odds and ends and came up with a few Doctor Who Miniatures figures, some Heroclix, as well as a Mantic Walking Dead Walker that I have several copies of the same sculpt of (one of which you've seen earlier in this post - I got two in my starter box, and I think got a couple as a sample at a previous Salute), and then scavenged some left over limbs and other assorted body parts from sprues, everything from zulus to Frostgrave Barbarians!

I tried the old 'hot water trick' on the Doctor Who figures to try and make them lie more naturally, but they didn't seem to take to it as well as other figures I've tried it on, so I had to fall back on cutting and re-positioning limbs, cunning placement, and in the end an avant-garde approach to realism. I also cut out some short lengths of sprue that I sunk into the base (thanks slightly softer than usual filler for making it so easy to jab a piece in, then fill the resulting hole with glue to hold it in place) to look like lengths of metal rebar poking out of the ground and rubble - a few were positioned to make it look as if the bodes had come to rest on them, rather than having a limb mysteriously held upwards of it's own volition!

A couple of nights of carefully piling tiny bodies, and I had my mound ready for a blast of spray undercoat:

Then it was just a case of frantically getting it painted as the Sunday posting deadline loomed ever closer! I went with a fairly muted palette, figuring that it's more a piece of terrain than an eye catching figure, and went to town weathering everything with grimy washes, as well as stippling on various shades of dust and grime, before finishing with a healthy dose of blood effects:

Here you can see the detail that I added to make it a Spawn Point rather than just a macabre piece of blocking terrain, a zombie hauling himself out from under the pile of bodies made from a Wargames Factory zombie body and reaching arm with a Westwind zombie head (as the Wargames Factory zombie face sculpts are awful, and only really useful to fill gaps between corpses on the pile as they do here):

Here is a size comparison against one of my original Spawn Points:

And with a survivor:

Whilst taking the pictures for this post, I realised that the base for this one was noticeably darker than everything else that I've finished, so went back and gave it an additional Bleached/Ushabti Bone drybrush, so now it looks more like this:

The piece as a whole is much darker than everything else I've finished, but hey, it's a grubby pile of bloody bodies, that's to be expected! If anything, I should probably go back and bloody up the ground a little more...

So, with that included, here is this Zomtober's complete output:

Not bad going at all, I think! I just need to paint some Survivors and I could even try out the All Out War rules in order to procrastinate on playtesting my own...

Which brings the Tally to:

32 vs -46 = +78

Hmm, 20 more figures to paint in the next two months if I'm going to hit that 'average one painted figure a week by the end of the year' challenge I set myself...

Also, for the first time in the history of ever, I'm disappointed that it's a four rather than five week Zomtober this year, as there were a few more bits that I had on the go that didn't managed to get finished in time to get added to this final submission. Who knows, maybe I'll get them finished and have a bonus fifth week post next week; maybe my hobby focus will sweep on to something else and they won't see the light of day until next year's Zomtober...