My Bones VI arrived last month, and I cracked into it. These zombies were the intersection of a couple of things I wanted to experiment with; faster batch painting, a homemade speedpaint recipe, and painting undead in desaturated colours. All experiments were successful in the learning-things sense, and as a bonus I got minis I’m pretty happy with!
Batch painting; obviously I’ve done some armies recently, but even TTRPG painting means sometimes you need thirty fuckin’ goblins, and while I’ve learned lots doing minis one by one it sure does serve the “I need minis” goal to be able to pour an army of mooks out onto the table and for them to looks pretty good. Or at least not grey. So! While kobolds might be “orange skin, blue/green clothes”, I thought it might be just as easy to slap four or five different colours on some zombies, assemly-line style. Once I had my paint ready I hit each set of sculpts (4 each of 4 different sculpts) with one colour on a random spot. So I’d take the desaturated blue and hit a dress, a cowl, pants, and shirt. I made sure not to double up any clothing colours, so only one dress was blue, one cowl was yellow, etc. This lets players identify individual zombies in combat (“I shoot the green dress zombie”) while still keeping them pretty much in a single theme. Cost me insignificant extra time.
Homemade speedpaint; 4 parts acrylic ink, 2 part gloss glazing medium, and 1 part water to improve flow. Dead simple recipe, but it took a little experimentation to figure out exactly how I wanted it. And, of course, grey behaves differently than blue which is different from yellow. But I got to play around and landed on some pretty adequate mixes. You can see highlights and shadows without my having ever had to paint highlights and shadows, which means I cracked the magical code and will use these in the future.
Desaturated colours; I got what I wanted out of these. I feel like I could push more, get a barely perceptible hue on a grey, but these do stand out as desaturated next to my full colour models or terrain. I think this is just right. I might to a nearly-grey undead hero of some kind later, though. Oh, and the skin was the regular desaturated orange I use for flesh, plus a dab of blue to get that classic undead green. Worked great, and thanks to the speedpaint I didn’t really worry about highlights and still got some effect. I went with grey/black for the hair on purpose, for speed and theme reasons.
