MINIATURE PAINTING: Zombies - Warhammer

OK, so I've been promising this for quite a long time so I finally felt brave enough, having gotten some models I was in love with, alongside getting as paint set to take pictures as I went along, but forgot in various stages, so I'll explain what I did.  (Doh!  Hence why I need to invest in a good camera to film it.)

So having bought the miniatures I firstly had to think about what sort of zombies did I want.  Did I want zombies that had just been dug up having been rotting for a while or did I want super fresh just palid ones?

Now as some people like to do, as a TTRPG'er I asked myself some questions:  

What is the story for my zombies?  

Where did they come from?

Who is controlling them?

What is the nature of the zombie?

Right, so this might seem a bit exaggerated but for me, what was important was this would influence my choice of colours.  So the story I came up with was:

Having crossed a good part of the world and having been challenged, the necromancer went to the nearest cemetery of a large town, the dead of the poor were buried close to the surface, the dead of the rich in either a mausaleum or protective cages to stop them being robbed.  The poor being easier to get to were raised and dug themselves up, so that meant being poor they didn't have fancy clothes, no purples or other colours that required expensive dyes so that limited it to a fair selection of browns, some tans and of course yellows (as we all know that a lot of clothing was washed in urine.)  So that was my clothing palette.  

Right, so how long had they been there, well only being a small town they could only have been there a matter of a couple of years/months and so they weren't going to look their best and with the skull and other bones poking through alongside wood that had been growing through their peaceful rest, they were going to be extremely unnaturally white with the dirt of muck covering them.

So that gave us this palette of colours to utilise.

Each of these paints I know has good coverage after a good shaking so that really helped as to be honest I've not really got to grips with a wet palette choosing to use the old tried and tested bathroom tile in the way I used all those years ago.  (You can pick one up from your local DIY store as a sample tile for about £1, if you have none in your home currently or a cheap side plate from your local supermarket.)  (I am referring to Army Painter colours for the rest of this article as they're the only paints I have currently.)

Now that has been sorted I had to decide how to undercoat, whilst some like to spray paint black and zenithal highlight with white, I decided just to go with white to start with as they were going to end up pretty dark and sometimes the darkness does hide some details that you might miss.

My first job was to cover the skin with as really pallid colour, so for that I used Mummy Robes to begin with, once that was done, I coloured the clothes and wood with a desert yellow and then allowed to dry.  Once this was done, I used the elven flesh to highlight and finished with a flesh wash over the skin.  After that I dry brushed with the necrotic flesh and left as it was.  The clothes were dry brushed with Elven Flesh and then an incredibly light touch of the demonic yellow (which was also used for the female zombies hair.  The wood was given a highlight of Oak brown (which sadly wasn't as thick as I really wanted, dry brushed with a little mummy robes.  With the male zombies hair being coloured necromancer grey.

Then finally after painting the female zombies shovel head with a matt black, dry brushed with a shining silver with some dots of Lava Orange for rust.  They were then coated in Vallejo's Black Wash.  

Hopefully in future we'll have additional paints but until I need to purchase more, my painting will be based using Army Painter unless otherwise stated.  Thank you for visiting.

Thunder Mouser.