88712 Zombie Troglodyte

It’s been a while. A combination of end-of-the-school-year business and other painting projects conspired to keep me from finishing these guys up.

I’m not a huge fan of the figures. Like the Chainmail skeletal orcs, they have a weird and cumbersome assembly process. Here, there are two short arm pieces that are separate from the stone axe, requiring four separate points to glue. Figuring out how to assemble them took me a while. In fact, once I got the hang of it, I powered through and did all four of these zombies in my collection, rather than having to go back and relearn how to put them together.

The sculpt itself suffers from the usual Chainmail tendency toward two-dimensionality. The effect is even worse here than with the skeletal orcs. There, at least, the core figure had some lateral bulk, and the glued-on elements helped to give the mini some interesting angles. There’s none of that here.

All that said, once I got into painting them, the process was fun. The figure’s dessicated skin and lurid hanging entrails (seriously, so gross), made for some fun painting. I’m still using the Painters Touch spray can primer. I’m treating this as a problem solved and don’t expect I’ll use anything else unless I splurge on an airbrush at some point.

The base color for the skin is Reaper highland moss, with pale lichen as a highlight. The guts and torn skin were a mixture of a pink promo paint I got from Reaper mixed with blood red. I built up from a pinkish color to something more lurid.  The bones are Reaper aged bone, and I used Agrax Earthshade and a blood red wash to give depth to the skin and the underlying flesh, respectively.

The stone axe is Reaper shadowed stone, using weathered stone as a highlight. Figuring out how to do lines on the stone taxed my limited skills.

The fun part of this was finishing the hanging entrails with Citadel’s Nurgle’s Rot, one of the GW technical paints that I’m really enjoying at the moment. It comes out of the pot looking like green snot, and it dries leaving a stringy, gooey texture that is awesome.

Here, by the way, is a piece I finished a few weeks ago using another technical paint: Blood for the Blood God. Getting the spatter right literally left my desk looking like I’d opened a vein.

Next up, I have another Skeletal Equiceph to do. And I’m prepping a piece I’ve been looking forward to painting for a while: the human shadow priest. Seriously, check this guy out: