It's time once again to ferret out those murderous vampires in a new VAU - Vampires Amongst Us. A cross between Cluedo and a roleplay, sometimes gory and often hilarious! Find out more and sign-up! here.
@Borgnine You chose well in going for the browny red scales - it reinforces your army colour nicely and works surprisingly well alongside the brighter red used on the gory bits, and also the bone colours. In fact, it's quite hard to find a favourite bit on an excellent model like this, but I think if I'm to point out a particularly eye-catching part amongst others it would be that big bulging yellowy eye and the mashed up face of the beast in the first image.
Great work once again, this thing's a piece of art - I like all the little details you've added too. Bravo mate!
An amazing piece of work mate! A project like this is what inspired me when I grew up reading the old white dwarf magazine's! Are the spears made out of statetroops arms with brasrods? I love it how one of the crew seemingly steers but it's obvious that he's realy not, if that sentence makes any sense ;)
@Farmer7574 Thanks! Red will have to do, I wonder how it'll look in the whole zombie horde ;)
@Nagash Worshiper Thanks, that means a lot :) Yes, those are brass rods and state troops hands (bought specifically for this project) and I understood the last sentence, so it makes at least a bit sense ;)
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I finally did it! All the zombies I could build are ready for painting! Well, I still need a single orc boar to zombify, but that bit is still in Poland and I couldn't find one to buy here in Germany - but other than that, it's ready. 8 bases full of those suckers. Last ones are really plain - I was out of bits and ideas to make them look extra special, so there's not much to show here - except the statues, that is. Last fillers I did when I knew how much exactly I need. That gives us also the last spider.
And here is how they look all together:
Now I need to paint them and I intend to paint them all at once, no batches, just one long production line. That may be detrimental to my mind's health, but at least it'll be fast - I really want to have them ready before February.
Those last two weeks were really full of activities which left only a tiny bit of time to do the actual painting, so the chances of having it all done by February are bleaker than I expected. Still, the faster the better - so I'll be trying my best.
So far I managed to do the most boring things - bases and trees. Slavic statues too, seeing as they are using the same color scheme:
Other than that, I started some Bretonnians - only they use such strong colors, so it's good to do them separately. I'll paint the base colors first and then add shades on all of them at once:
I don't envy you the painting, but man, the gigantic horde of truly original and inspired conversions will be worth it! So much fun to look through your plog and notice all the little details. The blood-eagled zombie is brilliant!
Oh this is going to be such an epic looking unit! Keep painting man! 2017 is almost over ;) Those Brettonians look amazing! Very colourful and detailed. Is that an Iron Islander I spot? ;)
Now I need to paint them and I intend to paint them all at once, no batches, just one long production line. That may be detrimental to my mind's health, but at least it'll be fast - I really want to have them ready before February.
@Nagash Worshiper Thanks too! Yes, he's an iron islander, well spotted. Those guys use the same emblems I planned for my Bretonnian knights several years ago - and back then I was really into GoT and ASoIaF and it shows ;) Later I painted also a Tully guy for them. Back home I have a Baratheon pegasus knight, Clegane questing knight and some Lannister footmen ;)
After the last post I painted the rest of the bretonnians and about three pieces on 40mm bases and now I'm back in Poland without access to my workshop till the end of the year... Maybe February as a deadline for them is too unrealistic after all! If only real life wasn't taking so much time! I take some comfort in the thought that applying basecoat is the most time-consuming part of the whole process for me! ;)
I've been catching up on your paint log the past few days, since I've had a bit of time and a lot of it predates my joining the forum. I'm in awe of your army. Such a great collection of modeling & painting!
I second that, truly a labour of love. With a couple of old 8th Edition friends coming back out of the woodwork, I might get back to finishing off my horde! Between Mantic Werewolves and the Rune Wars maggot knights, I've also got a lot of building and painting to do, but finishing an army of this size would be an awesome achievement. Keep going Borgnine!
@Borgnine Excellent conversions once again, I really like what you've done with those spiders. Looking forward to seeing these join the ranks of the painted.
@ZeroTwentythree Thanks! It's been certainly quite a journey those years ;)
@Dragonet Thanks! And you too, keep strong and paint some more :)
@Farmer7574 Cheers! Spiders are indeed quite interesting - they are a great opportunity to try doing that stringy good some people use for blood.
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The first piece of the last batch is finished! If not for the competition, I would do it much later, but this works too - at least 8 bases worth of filler is done and ready - only 174 to go! This one is an ogre cannon that was left in the forest for too long - it was quite a good opportunity for some cool weathering - moss included ;)
At last, I managed to put the flat, base colors on every zombie! The worst part is thus finished, the rest should be easier to get through ;) The skin and gore will come later, but those don't require switching between 20 different colors at least! As you can see, finishing them all until February is impossible (lots of real life distractions :( ) but I will still try my best ;)
Some of the bigger and more interesting pieces got shaded in the meantime. Now it's time to add shades to the rest of them. Then, the skin. Then, highlights. Then, gore. Then, flock on the bases. And then, lastly, adding magnets to the bases........
That will be a truly fearsome horde of corpses, impressive all by it's own. When I scroll by, I almost get itchy enough to paint some more Zombs, becaue I made the same mistake with my Zs as I did with the Gobbo Spears...Multi-based them wrong for fielding a KoW Legion, so now I have to add stuff on KoW troop bases. You Sir give, as always, excellent input!
@Farmer7574 thanks! They are shaping up quite well - and seeing them not being that white mass anymore is really motivating xD
@Theerteen thanks too! Seeing people come back to painting undead is always welcome, so get ready for weekly updates of zombies here! Also, congratulations on getting the 666th post in this thread! xD
Some first zombies are getting done out of that last group and I will be posting them soon - but first! - I noticed that I missed showing my Cursed Company here! The command group and the dwarf were there somewhere, but not the other ones - so I am fixing it now. Besides the metal originals, I had to add some replacement shields - or in the case of the saurus and the orc - a new weapon and a pauldron - not much converting, but still.
After that, I'll be posting next thematic batches of zombies - there will be some old minis mixed in, but there will be always something new. I'll build a buffer of such zombie batches to guarantee some regularity here and post them whenever there's nothing better to post. The finished horde will be posted as soon as possible, of course - with some closeups coming up later probably.
I can also announce that I finally caught up with my BLOG, yeah! This thread here and my standalone blog will now go concurrently - and you can find the link to that in my signature. It's a bit more organized there, many pictures are better and everything has a title and an icon ;) I am trying to keep it neat and that's the reason for all the stuff with the buffer, regularity and redoing of some zombie batches.
And that's all the rambling for now ;)
The backstory:
Forced members of Constantin's zombie hordes come and go very quickly - but there are a tiny few of such ‘recruits’ that accompany the vampire much, much longer than any other raised dead. Through all the years and battles their flesh managed to rot off their bones, but they still hold their gear and follow the horde loyally as always. This group is called either 'the oldest' or 'the luckiest' amongst the vampires. At this point, their master has grown fond of them and always tries to raise them back, should any of them fall during an encounter - that diverse bunch has become a prized element of his gruesome collection of undead.
So, as promised, more zombie fillers - only this time, completely new! Big ones seemed the most interesting so I started with them - and today I am showing the zombiefied Gorebeast taken from the Chaos Chariot kit.
I mangled the beast's armor, added some exposed gore and stuck some spears into it's back - also to offset the front-heavy composition of the miniature. The color scheme was switched a few times before I finally chose this one with the light skin. Adding weathering on both steel and copper was pretty interesting - one with rust, another with verdigris - it makes for a nice contrast, I'll have to try to use it more in future projects.
Backstory:
During one of the clashes with chaos marauders, von Greifen faced a chariot drawn by a gorebeast - ferocious and stubborn beast smashing its way through the undead forces. Surely, it made the chariot more dangerous than one drawn by horses, but it was also much less smart and it was easy to bait the vehicle into the forest. The chariot with its crew got quickly smashed on trees and roots, but the gorebeast kept charging. It was found dead, days later, many kilometers into the woods - after having fought with goblins, villagers, militia from Kislev, local wildlife and probably many others. Constantin knew that as a raised corpse it wouldn’t be just as effective as alive, but he was willing to settle for something close enough - even a fraction of that destructive power would be useful in his legion.
@Borgnine Great to see your take on the cursed company, the detailing you've added to the champion's cloak are awesome. They'll fit right at home amongst your current zombies.
The gorebeast is cool too, the spears work really well in breaking up the composition of the mini as you mentioned - making it look that bit more chaotic and non-uniform (as a zombie unit should). All those scars and leaking innards all bode well for the mini too. :) Top stuff as always!
Thanks, @Farmer7574 glad you like them :) And that cloak surely needed some detailing and checked pattern was easy enough to actually do it - I didn't want to get bogged in too intricate details on zombies... ;)
Another update, as promised. This time, trolls. The one in the middle was actually shown here, but his old photos were overexposed and bad, so it was a great opportunity to include it here together with its friends.
Other two are recent stuff. One on the left is an Undead Troll from Reaper Miniatures and I gave it a big nose and much larger ears to make it resemble a Stone Troll. The one on the right is a Zombie Snow Troll from Frostgrave and it isn't converted at all. Both of them are metal and pretty heavy - bases needed more magnets than usual to make them stick to the tray.
Some fluff for them:
Many kinds of trolls can be found in Varsavia. Local ones take characteristics from their environment and are easily recognizable by branches, moss or bark covering their bodies. Orcish incursions can bring stone and river trolls, and roaming black trolls always come down from the mountains in search of food here. Vampires need to deal with them rather regularly. Thankfully, despite their regenerative abilities, they can still be killed and raised as zombies - and they rot much slower too! Their stupidity legendary, they are also probably the only creatures in the world that get actually smarter after becoming mindless undead.
@Borgnine Great work on those trolls. Working on these zombie units must be pretty fulfilling in the aspect of having the opportunity to paint more or less any fantasy mini that you want whilst still bolstering your VC army. :) By the way, which parts did you use for your chaos warrior conversion a while back (on page 17 of your PLOG), was it a mix of kits or just warriors?
Is there an army you haven't touched yet to add to your zombies?
@Theerteen thanks dude! From where did you get that emoticon? ;)
@Farmer7574 thanks too! It is pretty fullfilling with all the creatures and colorful color schemes :) Problem is when making zombies out of them proves to be more difficult than expected - that's why I don't have much elves or dwarfs here. For the Chaos Warrior I used: back and two hands (together with axe handles) from the infantry set, axe and head from the knight set and feet from Orc Boyz set (there are legs there that are sitting, with armored boots). As for the diversity index in my zombies, hmm... I don't have a Chaos Dwarf - other than that, I have at least something from each old army. That is, if you count a Cursed Company dwarf as belonging to the dwarf army ;) And now that I think about it - i barely have any greenskins, for some reason - if I was using orc parts, it was for making buff human zombies. Maybe because it cannot use my standard zombie skin mix on them ;)
@Theerteen Well, I didn't see that button... so, that's about me knowing how everything works here, being a responsible moderator and all :innocent:
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Next update, this time: spiders!
A bit of fluff:
Forests of the Old World are teeming with giant spiders and Varsavia is no different - and they are also a good stock to use in undead armies. Raising them as undead proved to be slightly more difficult than it is with usual vertebrates, though - but Constantin eventually managed to do it after some experiments. Still, the process is somewhat faulty - spiders still try to hunt from time to time and their most common victims are other members of the horde. Vampires deem it an acceptable drawback, for they can crawl walls superbly and are perfect for terrifying their living opponents in battle.
Building those was a nightmare, but painting was actually fun - especially when I had some concrete examples I was trying to emulate. All of them got at least a bit of gloss varnish on their bodies to make them look slicker and properly arthropod-like. Their blood is also green or transparent here to push that alien look a little bit further - it was a great opportunity to try out that trick with glue mixed with paint to make it look all sticky and disgusting (technique taken/learned from @Theerteen ). That and water effects mixed with green paint. The glue turned out a bit too thick and green in comparison to the water effects, but for a first time, it is good enough.
First spiders shown here were based on the most characteristic ones one can outside here in central/eastern Europe - a Wasp Spider (called a Tiger Spider in Poland) and a Cross Spider(called a Teutonic Spider in Poland). The yellow one looks especially striking amongst all the other zombies in the unit - I will show that later when the whole horde will be done.
And the second two spiders are just vaguely brown/yellowish - I tried imitating other spiders found here, but I didn't find more really characteristic ones so they turned out pretty generic in the end. Now I think that I should have build a long legs spider - that would really stand out!
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