Some Finished Zombies

I finished the Citadel Vampire Counts Corpse Cart and some Wargames Factory and Mantics zombies recently, all destined for modern zombie/demon apocalypse type games.

Corpse Cart

I painted the corpse cart in a number of separate sections, rather than trying to paint it fully assembled. I made sure the body pile would fit into the cart (it's a very tight fit) and took reference photos so that I could check which legs/arms went through which side slat on the cart.

All well-and-good, but I still had a major headache putting the thing together once it was painted. After several attempts to re-seat the body pile, I had pretty much accepted that it wasn't going to lie flat, and that the driver would only be supported by a small spot of glue on his left foot (his right was hovering about 3mm in the air). In one final act of faith/desperation/bravado, however, I managed to get the body pile flat (I think I may have used up several months of luck achieving that without breaking anything). The body pile isn't glued to the cart at all, but I don't think it's going anywhere and there's no way I'm removing it to try and apply glue. The damage from all this was very minor and only required touching up a couple of areas where paint had rubbed off.

The cart and zombies were attached to the base using superglue gel(*), and even then I had to put elastic bands around the whole thing while it dried, as the right wheel was about 1mm off the ground when every other part was flat on it (I have the same problem with model vehicles - there's always one wheel that won't lie flat)

I painted the base to look like a road, with a white line running up the middle. I then painted out parts of the white line to make it look like it had worn away. It was shortly after gluing the model to the base that I realised I should have tried to make the road look more broken up, possibly with some potholes or raised chunks. However, the cart covers nearly the whole base, so I don't think it would have made much difference. I did add some grass clumps, which hopefully look like they're dead. The plan had been to have some green clumps in front of the cart and the brown ones behind - killed by the passing of the cart - but there's wasn't really any room at the front, so I abandoned the idea, settling for the brown plants.

Last, and slightly annoying - the bell isn't quite correct. I made sure it was vertical when the cart pole was horizontal. However, the zombies are below the cart, so the pole actually angles down slightly, which means the bell is leaning slightly backwards on the completed model.

Zombies

I have two boxes of the Wargames Factory (WF) zombies, and 30 or so spare Mantic ones (**).

Everything you may have read about the quality of the WF figures is true - they really are bad. I think they'll be fine as horde zombies, but the quality is really poor. I picked up some of their Zombie Vixens recently, and those are much nicer figures.

The Mantic zombies have much more aggressive poses than the WF ones. Their only drawback is that they're dressed in rags, and still look like fantasy zombies, rather than modern ones.

They were all painted fairly quickly, and without too much attention to detail on my part. I decided to shade them using Vallejo Sepia Wash but this didn't work as well as I'd hoped, and next time I may wipe most of the wash off afterwards rather than leaving it to dry on the model. The figures ended up more brown than I'd intended, but the highlighting muted them back a bit. They're healthier looking than I'd like, so I think I'll be trying a different colour mix/painting approach for the next group.

I added some scraps of card to the Wargames Factory figures bases, to try and make it look like paving stones. It looks okay from far enough away... The Mantic zombies were based using "Golden Fine Pumice Gel". This was meant to give a nice subtle road texture, but I had trouble smoothing it, and it is so fine you can't see it. I do quite like these gels, but I haven't found one that I'm happy with yet.

Anyway, no close-ups of them, just a couple of group shots

* I would normally use polystyrene cement on plastic figures, but it doesn't work so well if the surface to be glued is covered with paint, hence the superglue gel.

** These were in a box marked "20 Ghouls" that I bought at Claymore 2012. Given that I wanted the Ghouls, I was a bit miffed to find zombies, although they will come in handy. I still, however, need to buy the Ghouls at some point.