I got into D&D miniatures to run my 4th Ed. campaign, so I started with the WOTC Dungeons of Dread set and moved forward from there. 4th Ed did some neat things with zombies: they had the Chillborn, the zombie that died of frostbite and did cold stuff to you, and the Corruption Corpse, the artillery zombie that throws pieces of itself at you. I support both of those ideas, that's excellent thinking outside the box by WOTC. I also had some orc zombies from some previous set, and those are great too! Adventurers are essentially machines that generate orc corpses, after all. But the end result is that I had very few normal human zombies.
Also, these guys are the Anti-TV-Walking-Dead. I've seen a lot of TV-quality zombie makeup recently, where zombie-ism is depicted through white skin, circles around the eyes, and blood on the mouth. This sculpt depicts what that makeup can't do, the corpse that's a few months old, with a caved-in face and elongated limbs.
My paint job was an attempt to show this semi-mummified level of decomposition. I basecoated in mid-tone gray, washed in black, and highlighted in a mix of light gray and fleshtone. The clothes were done as brown rags. Sidenote, if you look on BoardGameGeek you'll see some of these zombies in Fred Flintstone clothes. The rags have these spots sculpted into them, and it's hard to resist the temptation not to do them in yellow with black spots. But I think that the sculptor was giving us surfaces for the brush to catch, and I kept things a Serious Brown.
"Adventurers are essentially machines that generate orc corpses, after all."
ReplyDeleteLOL!