Zombie Legion - Torn parts

Part of the Zombie Legion.

This batch was brought together rather accidentally, it was only after building the whole horde when I noticed that they kinda fit a common theme. The first one was the ogre, I had a lot of ogre bits laying around after assembling my Crypt Horrors and I wanted to use them somehow. With a head and two hands it was relatively easy to sculpt just the torso with some guts spilling out. The spine was taken from a skeletal horse model, you can see the unpainted conversion HERE.

The parts of a giant was my attempt at using all the extra parts from the Giant box. There are so many additional body parts there, it would be a waste to not use them somehow. It was just a matter of sculpting some additional flesh to show that the part in question was indeed torn or cut off. Even though there are giant hands in the kit, the hand crawling here comes from the Beastmen Ghorgon kit - I bought the spare bits from someone on ebay mostly just to get that limb and make it crawl together with my zombies. Its position was perfect for my needs, I just needed to sculpt the torn stump and insert a toothpick and a bone from the Crypt Horrors kit there. You can find the unpainted versions of the head and the hand in the WIP post HERE.

It’s no difference for a necromancer whether the raises whole bodies or only parts of them - even a single hand can crawl if it’s instilled with dark magic - it just isn’t worth it most of the times. Unless one finds a giant or an ogre - that’s something else. Of course it would be ideal to raise such behemoths whole, but Constantin doesn’t complain when he happens upon just some torn pieces. A crawling giant’s hand can still crush a grown man and an ogre ripped in two will still messily devour anything unlucky to be caught by it.

Zombie Legion - Command Groups

Part of the Zombie Legion

More zombies while I am meticulously painting all the individual scales on the dragon...

Now, these were fun! Ever since the very beginning I have been trying to assign one command group to every zombie unit. Champion included, even if zombies cannot have champions in 8th edition WFB. Not only those groups made them look more organized, which I like, but they were also very good from the hobby standpoint - lots of converting, freehands, creating more interesting dudes than just your usual wound markers.

Constantin likes his horde somehow organized, at least slightly resembling real military units. He achieves this by giving each section a command group, with his family banner, a musician and a single zombie dressed like an officer. Surprisingly, this somehow improves their performance on the battlefield. It is unknown, if it’s because of the residual memories in each walking corpse are making them fight better under one command, or because it makes vampires and necromancers easier to focus their magic better when they can recognize each unit on the battlefield. No matter what it is, Constantin keeps the command groups gladly, replacing them after each battle as soon as possible.

First, the champions and the musicians. For this purpose, a champion was basically any zombie that is sticking its weapon into the air - and I actually ended with more of them than 8, so I had to choose some favorites. Musicians were also fun to build - I have so many leftover instruments laying around, I could do twice the amount needed - and every one was a cool modeling opportunity. Like that half of a zombie sitting on a carriage - I was really running out of legs so I got creative with some balsawood.

And the standard bearers - with their height, I couldn't fit them on one picture with the rest. As with the musicians, I could use a lot of my spare banners thanks to them - and they were also a freehand opportunity too! I tried painting my usual von Greifen coat of arms in many different colors and styles. It would be good to mention here that the ghoul with a bretonnian helmet, holding an axe, that's something I copied from one creative take on the Flesh-Eater Courts, done by the user Dez in the Dark Age of Sigmar thread on TGA community HERE.

Varsavian Hermits - WIP

While I have been working on the dragon, I managed to fit a small WIP project to have something new to show this week.

For a long, long time I really disliked those old bedsheet spirit hosts of old. That's why I used LOTR minis for my own ghosts. But about a month ago, when I was looking through eBay I noticed three bases of them being sold cheaply and I realized that I actually like those goofy bastards and I totally want some.

Seeing as they are dressed in robes, have bald heads and use ropes as belts, I wanted to have them as some kind of monks - and mix them that way into my story. But their remaining hair is long, so that theme wasn't perfect. So next, I thought of the Russian ascetic hermits of old - I would only need to sculpt some beards and hats. The picture that inspired me is below the photos. This idea was also great to add some differentiation too - for all their oldschool charm, those ghosts come in only three variants and are rigid enough to make them unposeable. Besides that, this also instantly gave them some Slavic feel and made them fit better into my army and story.

EDIT: Painted ones can be seen HERE.

And here you can see the painting that inspired me the most on how to make them - "Hermit fathers and the immaculate women" by Mikhail Nestrov, 1932.

Zombie Legion - Elves

Part of the Zombie Legion.

The Dragon is taking a lot of time to paint, so I'll be showing some zombies in the meantime. This time, some elves.

I had some elf miniatures laying around, but I was never really fond of using them as zombies. They are all very clean, many of them with cloaks, robes - and the minis themselves, with their elves proportions, don't look very good if mixed with parts from the zombie kit. All of that makes it quite difficult to turn them into undead. Despite all that I added a small amount of them to the legion - even if it's only to have representatives of every race in the horde. Still, I think they turned out pretty ok - I especially like 'Lokhir Fellheart lite', the one with a standard crammed into his torso - and the wood elf with a bloody face. The High Elf one is from the old Cursed Company set, no converting needed - you can see other miniatures from that set in my collection, you can find them HERE.

Elves don't show up in Varsavia very often but Constantin can still boast about having few members of the elder race in his rotten legion. Some of those were parts of the Druichii slave raids, some were scouts operating in the Old World and some even fell from the sky after one of their aerial battles. Unfortunately, after being raised they don't retain their legendary skill or agility, so those zombies are just weak and frail versions of the human ones - with them it's probably more about collector's value than anything else.

And the second picture, an undead dark elf mistress whipping her zombie sub. The idea came to me when I was looking for usable bits in my Dark Elf Dragon box. There are two body options there, a male lord and a female sorceress. I wanted to place either one of them on a log and look silly, but I didn't know which one should I take - the sorceress won in the end because giving her a whip was an excuse to add someone being whipped in front of her, cheaply taking even more area using only 1 model more. That and the lord could be used for some vampire conversion later on, maybe. I added some trees to the bases, sculpted half a head for her, a new back for him, painted them - and a small BDSM action in the middle of the rotting horde was done. You can see the unpainted version HERE.

Blood Bowl Team - The Carcassonne Cavaliers

My second Blood Bowl team. The first one, Orcs, can be found HERE. I converted the standard human team to represent Bretonnia rather than Empire. It started with giving them extravagant helmets taken from Knightly Orders, but then I noticed that I don't have enough of them - so I made them Bretonnians instead. That makes them more varied, gives Bretonnia some representation in Blood Bowl (at least until the official team is released... as if!) and makes use of some of the helmets I had laying around my bits box. One change I made since the WIP post was to sculpt little shields on their chests. I wanted some clear, visible space to paint their coat of arms, but all the existing ones weren't good for that - so I made them myself. This strengthens their Bretonnia-ness even more! I also had to freehand all the markings on them, with texts on the bases too, because the font provided by GW didn't fit those knights at all.

At first, I wanted to paint them blue+yellow and call them Aquilean Aces - but that not only involved using yellow, making this project more difficult than it should be, it also narrowed down the colors I could use to those two. Because of that, I changed the color scheme to a red+blue background with yellow markings - not only it gave me more options when painting their armor, it also references the most common Bretonnian color scheme, which makes them even more recognizable.

All in all, painting some Bretonnians, all (mostly) clean and shiny was an interesting exercise, but I think I need to paint something darker now! That and finally play some Blood Bowl!

The Carcassonne Cavaliers are your typical Bretonnian knights-only team - proud, chivalrous and completely full of themselves. All the players were - as all self-respecting noblemen - trained from childhood to compete - and they are really good at it. They would probably win the championship already if only their concept of nobility and superiority weren’t hammered so hard into their heads. Every single one of those knights considers himself the star player, regardless of skill - and they notoriously underestimate their opponents, believing them to be beneath them. They also have big problems assisting their teammates - older veterans don’t want to pass to knights who aren’t their seniors - and the younger ones are impetuous and hungry for glory, always wanting to score the touchdown by themselves. Besides that, they are a pretty solid team!

First, the whole team:

And the individual Cavaliers: