The Shambling Terror...

More undead shamble onto the field of battle causing terror in their mortal foes!

Another horde of forty Mantic zombies...

I do like these models.

Another forty wouldn't hurt would it?! :-)

The Rotting Horde...

The first horde of forty zombies is now finished!

The miniatures are all plastics from Mantic, with a few Ghoul bodies used in the front row for some slight variations.

The detail on the plastics is superb and the options of spare heads and arms gives the model maker lots of opportunities for customising figures. The only thing to watch out for is ensuring they rank properly given a number of them are leaning or grabbing forward.

I pretty much followed this excellent tutorial from Dice and Brush which has produced great results in relatively little time (just have something else to do during the drying phases!)

A second horde is almost compete and hopefully will be up on the blog in the next couple of days.

Boronn the Wretched

I managed to grab a little bit of time today to finish off the Reaper Ogre Chieftain that has been sat on my workbench for almost a year (hardly time to gather dust given my usual 25 year delay!). He is one of their plastic Bones line and purchased to check out the material as much as it was because I liked the miniature.

Whilst the plastic is not to same as the hard styrene Citadel use and despite it looking slightly vinyl like in the raw, it produces an excellent result miniatures wise and paints up well using standard techniques (I washed, layered and drybrushed here).

The miniature has a very 'old school', almost Ral Partha look to it and I suspect it will fit in well with my old Citadel Ogres bought pack in the eighties when I find them(!) As this traditional style differs from the GW Ogre Kingdom look I decided to paint him in swarthy brown skin tones rather than the original Ogre Kingdom greyish skin I painted the Ogre Slayers.

Incidentally progress on the Zombie horde goes well, lots of block painting, and I hope to start splashing the dip sometime in the week...

The Undead Rise...

Last year I picked up some good deals on the Mantic Undead figures for a future exercise - that time has now come...

I've fancied making up the Zombies for a while now and this weekend I dug them out and stuck them together. Initially I planned to do three 32 figure units but in the end decided to make up two 40 figure hordes for starters.

I've only got as far as undercoating them but they look pretty cool en masse...

As previously discussed I don't hold with the Vampire Counts Undead army concept and reading the the WHFB2 Battle Bestiary it isn't really part of the limited background of the Old World contained therein either, Necromancers are the normal controllers of the Undead. So I need to hunt through Lead Mountain to find a suitable miniature...

Whilst the Zombies are a pretty straight forward painting exercise I have been pondering paint schemes for other Undead elements and any heraldry on shields and flags. Over the years I've seen some exquisite paint schemes of skulls, bats and other ghoulish paraphernalia but it strikes me unlikely that the recently risen dead would have anything other than the remnants of what they were interred with, so whilst it will be torn, muddy and even bloody, there won't necessarily be a lot of skulls and things on show. More on this when we get to the skeletons...