The Walking Dead: Zombies (I)

Here is the first batch of zombies for The Walking Dead.

I have to admit that it was really funny painting these figures, from choosing the clothing to the blood splatters, skin colour and even basing! I am having a blast going over them, they are great sculpts, fast and easy to paint, what else is needed?

As I am trying to make them look like they have been roaming around for a while, I followed this recipe:

1. Paint all base colours
2. Apply Agrax wash over the whole mini
3. Highlight a few details (just in some miniatures that I felt was required)
4. Paint base
5. Weathering and blood

As you can imagine, it is quite fast since after step #2 the miniature is basically done.

Jeans and modern clothing

These figures are quite different compared to what I am used to paint. They wear modern clothes as opposed to chainmail or space suits. Therefore, I have tried to make them look realistic. I have used real clothes as model and in some cases t-shirts or pullovers that I really own.

Since so many of the figures wear jeans, I made several tests before settling on a particular colour. In the end, I always made it with a combination of the following two:

Basing

As opposed to other wargames in which the figures are usually on a more or less unified scenery, in The Walking Dead, they can be on top of many different surfaces and I tried to be consistent with that.

I looked around for inspiration, and found that this blog post helpful; and also did some experiments, not all of them successful, but helped me find a technique with which I was comfortable with.

The different types of bases I can have are:

1. Outdoor
1. Sidewalk
2. Tarmac
3. Grass/outdoor
4. Mix of all of the above
2. Indoor

For this batch, I painted only Outdoor bases. These outdoor bases match nicely the printed board I have, as can be seen below.

Skin

I have basically two types of skin, dark or fair. In the case of fair skin, I tried mixing different colours to give the impression of different states of putrefaction. Greys and browns were used freely to achieve different and interesting combinations. You can see the two main colours used below: Neutral Grey and Highlight HSMC from Panzer Aces Vallejo. For the skin I used Dwarf Skin and Pale Flesh. Sometimes mixed with Bone.

I did not paint the eyes for now. I did a few tests and did not like how they turned out, therefore I left them with just a shadow. I might anyway revisit them at a later stage.

And here are the photos, painted in 2020.

Here one can see that the bases fit the board