Zomtober: Week 4

Zomtober zombie count: 23

     So here it is, the last Sunday of zomtober, another batch of zombies finished and, for some reason, a small batch of half finished zombies is still sitting on my painting desk. It is safe is assume that zomtober has properly infected me and my painting desk.

     This week I managed to get 8 zombies finished in time to meet the upload deadline and here they are; a real mix of plastic and metal zombies from a few different companies.

       I see this zombie scientist as the probable cause of the outbreak, who knows what he was messing with to create the infection.

    Two different pictures of my horde; the first is my efforts from zomtober, all 23 zombies, the second is of all my zombies that have been on the blog so far. I think it looks like a reasonable sized horde, maybe not enough for a massive game, but enough to start with.

      What do I do now zomtober is over? I might get withdrawal symptoms. Although, I do still need to sort out my lighting. . .
Thanks again for reading. 

Zomtober: Week 3

   

Zomtober zombie count:15

     Zomtober, week 3, a day early? I'm out all day tomorrow at another Star Trek Attack Wing tournament and as I don't want to miss the submission date, here it it. It's not my most impressive submission to zomtober so far, but my painting time has dried up quite a bit. Although I'm really aiming to do a big old blow out for the last post, next weekend. 

    Like my first week's zombie line up, this one is made up of three plastic zombies from the zombie studio sprue and a single wargames factory zombie vixen figure. I am trying to focus a bit more on the pure bulk of this horde again, as I feel I may have got a bit distracted by the shiny metal models that fell through my letter box, or I dug out of my lead pile, last week. 

      I'm also halfway through another couple of zombies, so even if next week is another busy one I should have something to submit, although my aim is to get above 20 before the end of October, that's starting to feel a little high.

Thanks for reading.

The goblin horde

     I think this post needs to start with an apology to Michael Awdry for putting you to shame with the speed I am getting my painting done at the moment. I can only say it won't last and its only because of quick, easy colour schemes.

     Carrying on from that though, here is the last few bases I needed for the standard sized Hordes of the Things army. Another 3 bases of basic spearmen, my hero and a behemoth, simply because it's a fantasy army and I can.

      So, this is what it all looks like ranked up, not bad for a quick bit of painting after work, in front of the tv. It really does show what a limited palette colour scheme can achieve. I just can't wait to get them onto the table top now for a game.

Thanks for reading

Zomtober: Week 2

Zomtober zombie count:11

      So deadline day again, that came round quickly, and here are this week's submissions.

     First up is a zombie mime, every horde needs a mime, What? They don't? Ok, lets move quickly onto the big zombie. Every horde needs a massive, hard to kill zombie, that you can imagine taking shotgun shell after shotgun shell and still coming. On a differnt note, this figure reminded me a lot of a guy I used to work with.

     Last up, are another of my plastic zombies, a figure whose face I am really unimpressed with the sculpting on, and some zombie dogs that I picked up a couple of weeks ago from the Essex Warrior's show. I was kind of hoping to be the first to get something like this up, this zomtober but Roy's attempt was first, and I have to say, a lot better than these. Zombie dogs should fill out the necessary fast zombie slot of the horde, they don't have to be strong, just too fast to deal with.

Thanks for reading

The first milestone just went by

      This is just a quick, completely unscheduled, post to say thanks to everyone who reads this blog. Thanks to you guys we just went past the 1000 views mark, as I write this we are on 1003, and we have 13 followers, after only 5 months and 47 posts. Way beyond what I thought I would have by this point.
        I would like to give an extra special thanks to Herbert West and Michael Awdry for the glowing recommendations they both posted about this little blog. I have un-ashamedly stolen many an idea from Mr Awdry's blog and from the work Mr West is doing I have no doubt I will doing the same again with him, he is a shoe in for a liebster award nomination next time that comes to our little corner of the internet.

      Dinosaurs and or zombies, guaranteed to make your blog better. Hmmm, zombie dinosaur? Some one needs to get on with that. . .

Now, lets look for the next milestone

And now for a different horde

      Going through the lead pile (which in my case is mostly plastic), I stumbled across an old Warhammer Fantasy starter set from a few years back, that Games Workshop actually paid me to take away (a long story), just sitting there collecting dust, as I didn't have a use for anything in it. A quick count of the contents and I had a brain wave, could this be the cheap (free?) Hordes of the Things army to use down the club I had been looking for?
       The box was The Battle For Skull Pass, night goblins vs dwarves. There didn't appear to really be enough dwarves to make a decent HoTTs army from, but the goblins were a different matter. As long as I was willing to use 4 goblins with spears to a base as proper spearmen rather than 5-6 to a slightly bigger base as a horde, I would have enough in the box to get just over a minimum army. Other than the warboss, all the figures are single part models, I just have to cut the tabs off their bottoms, and with a quick paint job they should rank up really quickly.
       So here are my first 10 points, of a planned 24 point army, that I painted up over a couple of nights. I am going to add another 3 stands of spears, a warboss (hero) and a behemoth in the form of a troll.

     The other decision I made was to put 3 archers to a base rather than my club's accepted 2, as I felt goblin archers would be so bad the extra guy might just mean they do as much as normal archers, and it also made the base a bit fuller and more in keeping with the horde nature of the army.

      I got another few metal zombies painted up while I was doing these, so hopefully I will have a really good zombie horde for this Sunday's deadline.

Thanks for reading

Zomtober: Week 1

       So here it is, deadline day for the first week of Zomtober, and I have to be honest, its not an explosive start. These are the first 4 zombies I will submit to the challenge, if I can do 4 (or more) zombies every week this month I should be able to take the asterix off of my zombie horde label, which is my real aim.

Zomtober zombie count:4

        Humans in wargames always seem to be white, so I have planned to get some other colours mixed into my horde to try for a bit more diversity, and I have to say, I am really pleased with how his skin colour came out. I was really worried it would just be a muddy brown rather than an actual brown skin colour.Now can I work out how to get a variation in darker skin colours?

      The models themselves are from a couple of different manufacturers; the male zombies are sold by hassle free miniatures but I think they are actually from the zombie studio range, while the female is from the zombie vixens box sold by wargames factory I believe.

     Right, I had better get some serious painting done to make the next few weeks a bit more impressive, and I do have some good plans to put into motion.

Thanks for reading this, now I am off to paint some more zombies and read the other entries . . .

Lannister war-band for Saga

      A couple of months ago, a few of us at the club got chatting about the Game of Thrones tv series. One of the guys had just got into it and was buying up box sets as quickly as he could, but he also had that hobby itch to model something from the series. So that got us thinking . . .

      In the end the challenge became; both Alan and me had to build and paint a 4 point Game of Thrones themed Saga list ready for a game the last weekend of September. Easy. He picked the northern Starks and I picked the southern Lannisters.

      I decided to use one of the normal lists rather than one of home brew ones on the Saga forum, but that doesn't mean it won't change in the future, and went for the Normans as they seemed to suite the way the Lannisters go to war. Looking at the Norman battle board, I quickly realised their strength lies in their crossbows and their knights, but, as I wanted this list to be nothing like anything else I would ever play in Saga, I opted for a full mounted war-band. 

     The biggest problem I then had was trying to work out how I was going to model and paint them. The armour the Lannister troops wear in the series just wasn't how they looked in my head from reading the current books, which gave me massive hobby block for the first month of the challenge. I bought up a box of the Perry mounted men at arms as I thought the mix of different armour would suite the Lannisters, and I bulked out my numbers with a pack of War of the Roses mounted troops and a pack that included Edward IV to be my Lannister noble.

      After reading the September copy of Wargames, soldiers and strategy magazine, I had a brain wave. There was an article in it where the author had done exactly the same thing we were intending, but had stumbled across an interview by the Game of Thrones book's author, George R R Martin, where he compared the conflict with the War of the Roses. The Yorkists and the Starks are comparable, while the Lancastrians and the Lannister are too. So that's the inspiration I took for my paint scheme. Metal armour rather than the black and gold from tv and red lance shafts just to try and get some more of the family colour into my warband.

Teclis Lannister

      The war-band does need a bit of a touch up as it was painted really quickly for the deadline day, but the overall feel of it is right and I am pretty pleased with how it went. It probably needs more lion motifs on any available surface to make it feel a bit more fantasy but as the books feel much more historical in their feel than full fantasy I think I prefer the slightly under stated nature of the paint jobs, although a Lannister noble should always wear gold and ride a white horse . . .

       Again to speed the project up I chose to have all my troops as hurscarls to keep numbers right down,, but I feel that of all the potential kings in Game Of Thrones, the Lannisters are the ones with the most resources to throw at having an elite army, so I don't feel like I have gone against the grain by doing this. They will have their peasant army somewhere, but it's somewhere else.

     The game itself was delayed due to Alan's work commitments, but I am aiming to get a post on his models and a report up of how the game itself went in the next few weeks, just soon as we can organise us both being in the same place at the same time. 

Thanks for reading. Now, onto painting zombies!