It just came off in my hand!

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to start watching Doctor Who again. We’d originally stopped watching when Capaldi took over, and so I thought I might as well start again, and work my way back through the modern series that I’d previously watched. I then delayed this plan by a couple of years, as I figured that I’d like to watch it with my children, but they were a bit young for it at the time. So when my eldest hit 8, I figured it was go time! It’s still a bit scary (and to my surprise, my youngest has clicked with it more than my eldest, and he’s only just turned 4), but I thought it might also be an opportunity to play some games too, so I turned to the Doctor Who Miniatures Game:

(The sun came out today, so I took the opportunity to take a poses picture too!)

For the first scenario, based on the first episode with Christopher Ecclestone’s Doctor, you need 6 Autons:

3 are Autons from the Doctor Who Micro Universe range, that I was luckily able to pick up dozens of packs of way back when.

I mixed up the colours a bit to try and give them some variety, but didn’t do any conversion work, as I figured animated mannequins would probably be on pretty much the same pose anyway…

To bulk out my ‘official’ Autons, I turned to the human figures from the Micro Universe range. While the monsters are generally brilliant, the human figures suffer from soft detail on their faces and hands - which makes them ideal candidates to be painted up as mannequins!

I took (from L-R) Martha, the eleventh Doctor, and Sarah-Jane, and cut and repositioned their arms to make them look slightly awkward, like their arms are fixed in position:

Mannequin Martha has come out looking a little bit like she’s coming in for a hug, but I’m not mad about it.

Finishing this half dozen brings the Tally to:

19 vs 41 = -22

What comes next? There’s a bunch of odds and ends on my painting tile, so I should probably work on clearing some space there! Although I should probably work on some more modern terrain…

Christmas, a time for… Daleks?

Work continues apace on finishing miniatures to drag my annual total up to one a week before the end of the year, but I did take a brief diversion to paint this:

My deputy at work is a big Doctor Who fan whose favourite colour is baby blue, so I thought I’d add a deputy sheriff star to a Dalek and paint it up to give it to her as a little gift. Looking at the pictures as I’m posting this, I’m wondering if I should try to add Deputy or her name to the star, but worry that it might go horribly, horribly wrong…

Dalek miniatures have 48 little globes, I discovered while painting this, which each need to be individually carefully painted and highlighted. They look a little rough in these blown up pictures, but rest assured they look fine in hand! The idea that I might one day have an army of painted Daleks took a bit of a hit after painting just the one, mind… using dark grey rather than black to shade the recesses of the metallic areas has set some wheels turning in my head though, proving that everything you do is a learning opportunity!

Tally:

39 vs 23 = +16

Next, a return to our regular scheduled programming of finishing the various odds and ends on my painting tile, and not prepping a whole load of new miniatures that now need undercoating. Oh no, certainly not, laser focus, that’s me.

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...

Zomtober 2015 - big finish!

As alluded to in my previous post, I had big plans for my final week after Zomtober post: a zombie herd!

Alas, the pictures that I took while there was still natural light were blurry and horrible, and the ones that I took later were dark and grotty, so apologies in advance:

The herd is mostly those horrible plastic multi-part zombies that were the first release from Wargames Factory (before they'd gotten used to CAD) with a few Heroclix and Doctor Who and Stsr Wars miniatures mixed in for a bit of variety, with the occasional metal zombie head from Westwind mixed in to disguise their origins! On the Wargames Factory zombies front, after the first coat of grey on the flesh I thought they might not turn out looking quite as bad as I'd expected, but sadly the second lighter shade of grey robbed me of all illusions that they wouldn't look bad - the detail is just too soft! I thought that I'd probably end up covering the majority of them with blood, but ended up being quite restrained when it came to it...

In terms of rules for the herd, I think I'd planned for them to be something of a roaming hazard rather than an enemy per se - too big to really take on single handedly, winning a combat against one would be more surviving to get away rather than glorious victory...

I'd pictured 'wounds taken' being less damage to the herd, more a loss of cohesion - potentially having some stats equal to the number of wounds that the herd has remaining, so as the herd is taken apart it starts being less of a maelstrom of destruction.

I also condsidered a special rule where whenever a wound is taken by the herd, a fresh (single) zombie is a placed in base contact with the herd, to represent it spreading out until eventually all that is left is a scattered handful of single zombies that can then be singled out and exterminated rather than the unstoppable wave that is the herd at full strength - so it would take some doing, but you could eventually wear away at the herd until all that is left is say 8 or so zombies - but in a game where ammunition is scarce and prolonged gunfire is only going to attract more enemies, is it worth it?

Finishing the herd (which I think I started at some point a couple of years before I got married, and potentially long enough ago that I could still have been described as being in my early twenties) brings the Tally to:

59 vs 131 = -72

So, overall Zomtober productivity this year leaves me with this:

Not a bad result I don't think? Plus, seeing everyone else doing it left me with more ideas for things I want to do, so roll on next time!