Zombie Legion - Trolls

Part of the Zombie Legion

Another batch of zombies - trolls this time.

The one in the middle was sculpted and painted much earlier than the other two - in July 2016 to be precise. I wanted to have a zombie troll in my army, but I didn't have much troll parts other than some arms and heads from the GW River Trolls set - so I had to work with exactly that. Besides those two arms, the top half of the head, the ribcage and the branches - it's all sculpted. Back then it was probably my biggest sculpting project - thankfully decaying zombies are pretty forgiving and it was easy enough. You can see the pictures of it unpainted HERE. While I was at it, I added branches and some fungi on it to make it a Forest Troll - which fits my theme pretty nicely.

Other two are recent stuff. One on the left is an Undead Troll from Reaper Miniatures and I gave it a big nose and much larger ears to make it resemble a Stone Troll from the WFB universe. The one on the right is a Zombie Snow Troll from Frostgrave and it isn't converted at all. Both of them are metal and pretty heavy - bases needed more magnets than usual to make them stick to the tray. You can see them unpainted HERE.

Many kinds of trolls can be found in Varsavia. Local ones take characteristics from their environment and are easily recognizable by branches, moss or bark covering their bodies. Orcish incursions can bring stone and river trolls, and roaming black trolls always come down from the mountains in search of food here. Vampires need to deal with them rather regularly. Thankfully, despite their regenerative abilities, they can still be killed and raised as zombies - and they rot much slower too! Their stupidity legendary, they are also probably the only creatures in the world that get actually smarter after becoming mindless undead.

Zombie Legion - Chaos Gorebeast

Part of the Zombie Legion

I once bought some bits from the Chaos Chariot set to get those horses - and the sprues came with a whole gorebeast included. It was an easy decision to turn it into a zombie and add it to my horde. I mangled the beast's armor, added some exposed gore and stuck some spears into it's back - also to offset the front-heavy composition of the miniature. The color scheme was switched a few times before I finally chose this one with the light skin. Adding weathering on both steel and copper was pretty interesting - one with rust, another with verdigris - it makes for a nice contrast, I'll have to try to use it more in future projects.

The unpainted conversion can be seen HERE.

During one of the clashes with chaos marauders, von Greifen faced a chariot drawn by a gorebeast - ferocious and stubborn beast smashing its way through the undead forces. Surely, it made the chariot more dangerous than one drawn by horses, but it was also much less smart and it was easy to bait the vehicle into the forest. The chariot with its crew got quickly smashed on trees and roots, but the gorebeast kept charging. It was found dead, days later, many kilometers into the woods - after having fought with goblins, villagers, militia from Kislev, local wildlife and probably many others. Constantin knew that as a raised corpse it wouldn’t be just as effective as alive, but he was willing to settle for something close enough - even a fraction of that destructive power would be useful in his legion.

Zombie Legion - The Oldest

Part of the Zombie Legion

My collection of all the old Cursed Company miniatures that I managed to hunt down on eBay. I painted them around August 2017, but I never made good photos of them, they got lost in the whole horde of zombies - so I am fixing my mistake right now! I got the champion, the dwarf, the orc and the saurus without their shields, so I had to get them some replacements from my bitz box. The lizardman got also a more modern weapon to fit his shield better and the orc got a pauldron to make him a bit bulkier - not much converting, but still.

Forced members of Constantin's zombie hordes come and go very quickly - but there are a tiny few of such ‘recruits’ that accompany the vampire much, much longer than any other raised dead. Through all the years and battles their flesh managed to rot off their bones, but they still hold their gear and follow the horde loyally as always. This group is called either 'the oldest' or 'the luckiest' amongst the vampires. At this point, their master has grown fond of them and always tries to raise them back, should any of them fall during an encounter - that diverse bunch has become a prized element of his gruesome collection of undead.

Zombie Legion - WIP #11

And in the early December, I managed to build all the four units that I still needed for my great zombie legion. This makes 8 of them - 50 wounds each, 400 in total. Last ones are really plain - I was out of bits and ideas to make them look extra special, they are using standard zombie and Empire Free Company bits. But there are still the statues, that is. Last fillers that I did when I knew exactly how much I need. That gave us also the last spider.

When I built the last zombies in December, I actually lacked three more bases - they were reserved for a boar I wanted to zombify - and I needed to take that boar from home when I was visiting there for Christmas. Unfortunately, I didn't make a photo of it when it was unpainted so this sprayed version will have to suffice. I stuck a lot of weapons in it, covered it with boils and exposed some bone on the face and leg.

And here is the photo of those last 4 units completed, being ready to be based and painted. The stegadon got finished earlier because I used him in a competition on Carpe Noctem. You can see that undead dinosaur HERE.

And this makes it also the last post which isn't about my current work - I managed to post all my archived stuff and the blog is up-to-date. Now I am painting all those zombies - with one exception, they are being painted all at once - basing for all of them, then applying flat colors, then shading and so on - just a one long production line. I will group them up in batches at the highlighting step and post them here, batch after batch, like I already did earlier with the Minotaur or the Stirlanders, for example. There are some things that are on my CN blog that aren't posted here, as I need to reorganize them with the new stuff and then post them here again.

Zombie Legion - Undead Stegadon

Part of the Zombie Legion

And by the end of November 2017, I managed to finish painting the undead stegadon - you can find the WIP post HERE.

The beast being hollow inside, with all the zombies on top made it quite difficult to paint - it's really a wonder I managed to avoid sticking one of those pikes in my eye. I had some problems deciding what color should it's skin be - green would fit well, because most of my undead are green and red seemed like the obvious choice, but I was worried about it making the gore stand out less - and blue was also an option. In the end, I painted him this dirty reddish hue - somehow I wasn't able to envision him different than red - some strange stubbornness on my part. In hindsight, I think I could have tried harder making its skin less flat and maybe give those zombies uniforms in similar colors - but then I remember that it's part of a zombie horde and he looks good enough for that.

Nobody really knows how the giant carcass of a Lustrian stegadon managed to make its way into Kislev, but it didn't really matter - Constantin happily added it to his zombie horde, making it the crowning piece of his morbid collection. Mimicking the lizardmen way of combat, some zombies are ordered on top of it, but that's mostly just for show - they are not capable enough of both staying on top of the beast and fighting back. To add to that, this rotting behemoth is just a slow, lumbering wall of flesh - barely capable of dealing any real damage. All that doesn't matter though, for it is hellishly resilient and capable of stopping almost everything in its tracks and helped the varsavian vampires many times. It makes for excellent surprises too - vampires love the look on their enemies' faces when that beast arrives on the battlefield in the middle of a Varsavian forest.

Zombie Legion - WIP #10 - Varsavian Warriors

Early in November 2017, when I had to wait for some Milliput to cure, I took a box I bought lately and started putting it together - that was Frostgrave Barbarians. I thought that with some light converting I'll be able to make them look vaguely Slavic as an alternative to kislevites in my zombie horde - just as pre-Christian Slavs are to polish commonwealth nobles. It's a nice set, by the way, the quality is good and the options are varied.

Here you can see the whole 20-man unit ready to be based and sprayed.

Zombie Legion - WIP #9

Even more zombies - I managed to build yet another two units. That was the end of October 2017. Here is how that new messy rabble looked like:

And now for some highlights of that part. First, the spiders. Because who said that only vertebrates can become zombies? Only something had to be done about those static and monopose models. Shame that they were so hard to work with - it was quite difficult to cut the legs away from the body - I did that with a red-hot scalpel, really testing its heat resistance. Setting them up in new positions also required lots of pinning. Good that I didn't have to do so many of them - three here, with one more coming up later. They will be a great occasion to try doing stringy gore out of glue and paint.

Here are some single miniatures, two made out of 40K chaos cultists and one elf. One in the middle is supposed to be a victim of an alleged Viking execution method called the blood eagle.

The tree of the dead. An idea I had for quite a long time - it came to me when I noticed how many of those cage bits I had laying around. It was also good to use that 'hanged zombie' as intended for a change. Aptly, yet another creepy cultist is overlooking it.

And last ones of this part, more trolls to accompany the one I did earlier. The first one, an Undead Troll from Reaper Miniatures got refaced a bit to resemble a classic WFB Stone Trolls - because I really like them. The second one is from Frostgrave and it was nice and undead enough to not need any conversions - and that's rare in this project.