Zombicide Black Plague - Zombies

Painting some zombies

Two months have passed since my last update - I've been working intensively on painting the zombie, abomination and necromancer figures from Zombicide Black Plague. I'd like to start with thanking and giving credit to Sorastro for his absolutely incredible black plague painting tutorial video series. If you're a beginner/intermediate miniature painter they are a great guide how to paint miniatures and use various techniques. All my work presented here is based on his tutorial. Also as my next project I want to tackle Star Wars Imperial Assault for which Sorastro has also prepared a painting guide.

 

Lessons learned

• Blood: I tested out Citadel's blood for the blood good and it's ok, however as one of my friend said, the figures look like someone purred some jam on them :) Sorastro presented an alternative method of mixing Tamaya's clear red with some brown and black paint. I tested this technique out on my last zombie batch and I'm much happier with the result - the blood looks darker, more realistic (less "jam'y") and you can apply different shades.
• Varnish: I tested out Army Painter's Anti Shine Varnish and I have to say I have mixed feeling. The result is generally good (although sometimes a bit of "sparkling" is noticeable), however when painting a batch of 20 zombies it's very difficult to fully cover all figures so that no glossy patches remain. To get a good result I'd need to do a few layers and in the last one spray each figure individually, so I think for batch painting I'll just use my airbrush and Vallejo's varnish and if I just want to spray a single/few figures I'll use aerosol varnish to avoid the airbrush cleaning overhead.
• Highlighting: I'm not very happy with highlights on the abomination and necromancer. I followed the tutorial, but my result is far from the original - the edges between different colors are too noticeable. I believe I need to apply more layers with more intermediate shades to get a smoother transition. I'll keep on practising on upcoming figures :)
• Pictures for blog: I decided to buy a black screen for the background so that my figure pictures look more professional and it's better, but in general my picture quality is still quite poor. I definitely need to work on the light, so it's less direct and higher resolution camera would also help. Turns out making good pictures of your miniatures can be as challenging as painting itself.

 

Result

And finally here are all the miniatures painted

 

 

What's next

For my next project I decided to pick Star Wars Imperial Assault. I'll be following Sorastro's guide. I already finished building my own insert from foamcore to help protect my minis. The foamcore insert did require some effort to build, and the cut lines aren't as clean as in professional inserts, but overall the insert seems to be more durable than I expected and fulfil its role well, so I'm quite happy with the result.

I will also want to finish Zombicide Black Plague by painting the hero figures, however I decided to wait for Sorastro to release videos tutorial for those, as till now 2 out of 7 videos appeared, so that will probably come later in the year :)