King of the Zombies....Zombisaurus rex!

Finally! We've seen the goodies, the baddies, and the uglies, but now it's time for the pièce de résistance - the King (of the uglies).

This guy was a blast to paint, if not to put together. He's a resin model so he needed a fair amount of green stuff to plug gaps. I took advantage of the fact that he was a zombie to not worry about whether or not the gaps were filled completely smoothly - decaying flesh isn't expected to be ready for a Dove ad, after all. A couple of claws and teeth had to be sculpted, too - less room for error there, though.

For painting I had originally intended to make him more brown, a kind of brown with hints of olive. I got a bit carried away airbrushing greens, however, and he wound up being more of a fantasy creature with less of the natural browns I had wanted. Using washes I tried to put some brown into the model, but it just made him look dirty (which is fine for a zombie) rather than making him look brown. Lesson learnt: make sure you start with the colour you want, and don't get carried away working through your collection of greens. Still, he looks really nice and he was well recived, and presents a fearsome, boss-level opponent for the characters in the DnD campaign of which he will be part. I hope he eats someone!

Until next time, happy painting!

Campaign Characters

Every DnD campaign needs some protagonists, and the most dedicated protagonists need fantastic models to represent them. Here are two!

This character comes from the tribes but he's taken up adventuring for reasons best known to himself. Maybe it's the impressive amount of gold you can acquire by slaying monsters and raiding tombs in the jungle. He was painted mostly with Contrast paints and because of the funny angle of his pose is really hard to take a suitable photograph of!

This dwarf has a wandering spirit that has taken him far from his mountain home. This was one of the best characters I've ever had the pleasure of painting - an absolutely stunning model packed with character and beautifully proportioned. I definitely want to get one for myself at some point. While a lot of people like dynamic poses of the jungle barbarian above I'm a big fan of more static, classic poses like this dwarf. Like the above, he was painted mostly with Contrast paints, which are great for browns. I think I mentioned this before but if you want to paint wood, leather, or anything that calls for a lot of different brown tones, then Contrast is a great tool to have.

I decided to work on my non-metallic metal for both of these guys. I used contrast paints for the gold but the steel was ordinary brushwork, and is my favourite NMM silvery metal I've ever done. I'm especially proud of the barbarian's sword and can't wait to do some more!

Anyway, I hope you like them. And I hope the players whose characters these will represent like them too.

Until next time, happy painting!