My April Submission to the OWAC2.

Hi All,

Well I finally got my skeletons and Zombies finished.

Here they are.

10 Skeleton "archers" from Skull and Crown: Triumph of Death

And 20 of the plastic boxed set of Zombies from Games Workshop. Which they still sell here.

I thought I'd give you a close up of the banner as well. In the next few days I'll do a post on how I did it. I call it paint by numbers, as I can't draw very well. It involves stitching together various line art in GIMP or Photoshop and then printing it out on paper and coloring within the lines.

The skeletons were once again base coated white and then slathered in a mix of yellow and brown ink before being drybrushed with the Reaper Bone Triad. The zombies were base coated grey and painted with Reaper's Undead Skin Tone Triad. I tried to use some color desaturated with grey, it was so so in my opinion. I also painted some areas that were intended to be flesh as cloth, such as the banner bearers legs. The exposed muscles and guts got a wash of Purple and Red ink, with the guts getting an additional light highlight, I think of slate green.

Anyway, I'm glad to see the back of these. I will be working on the Plague Cart and Grim Reapers for May.

Thanks for looking and commenting.

Get a deal on Zombies of Karr-Keel

Hi All,

Sarah, from Upstream Games House, liked my blog post so much she offered a special deal of 10% off all purchases of $75 or more.

So if you haven't yet ordered any you could order the full set of zombies and the zombie cart, or three zombie carts, and get 10% off your order.

Just put SEANSDEAL10 in the coupon code thing, but don't take too long. The coupon is good until May 31st.

Do you like savings Billy?

Check out Upstream Games House

Hi All,

  Do you like cool zombies made from original art with their own unique backstory? Do you like Kev Adams sculpts that scale with your classic Oldhammer miniatures? Do you like supporting good people who are trying to make their own dreams come true and share that with the community? If so, look no further,

Screen Cap of the mobile website

As a reader of this blog you are probably peripherally aware of Brian, he is one of the regulars of the East Coast Oldhammerers and responsible for GMing many of the games at Oldhammer Weekend USA events. You may remember such scenarios as Frog Hunt, Remember the New Alamo, The Sword of Light and Good, Santa Orka 3 and Battle at the Farm.

So what I'm trying to say is this dude knows how to game.

Anyway check out the new website Upstream Games House and join the Facebook Group: Zombies of Karr-keel.

Do it!

Zombiecide, more putty and a little painting.

Hi All,

Just thought I'd share what's going on.

We made it through the intro scenario, the zombies were worrisome. I got Clovis killed right before the end. The last room had 4 zombies in it. He had three dice to attack and missed all three. Was shredded by the zombies.

The second game was over quick. The necromancer and Abomination came out in the first two turns. Baldric took care of the Necromancer with a mana blast and Ann and Clovis burned the abomination with Dragon Bile. we were fortunate to find the bile and a torch pretty easily. I did wonder if we could use the inferno or fireball spells to ignite the bile.

Moebius Sphincter is coming along, I've got some ideas for working up his armor.

I fixed the gaps on the left arm and wings. It's still too hot outside to prime, so I'll do it in the morning.

I've also started mailing out the t-shirts.

Thanks for looking.

Zombtober Week #3 - Four 40mm Zombies

Huzzah! The last of the 40mm Zombies are finished.

I went with a more contrasty, for me any way, style with these. I decided noy to do highlights on the pink robe after the issues I had with the flat surface of the survivors coat.

I hope the checks on the shirt work for you. For some reason I wanted to snazz him up, I think that is part of why I couldn't get anybody finished last week. I also played with a splatter technique. I feel like this one worked a little better than one I had tried several batches earlier, but I still need to work on my weathering technique.

I need to get cracking on so many things. Hope you paint flows and your brushes keep their points.

Paint Table Staurday (Friday Night) - You must WIP it!

Hi All,

Well it's Saturday in certain parts of the world.

I've been busy/mopey. Found out I'm going to lose my tooth and then they were worried I was on the verge of having a heart condition because of my left shoulder, side of face issues.

Clear bill of health, normal EKG, although there was an unpleasant conversation about the effects of Brain tumors on facial nerves. But we seem to be in good shape.

Sorry, your here for pictures of little men. Right!

Above are those 40mm zombies. I missed last week for Zombtober, seems to happen every time I start to assembly line paint. There are not finished,but are a wash and a couple of details away.

Basing gunk on the 20mm metal Lizard men and remaining 1/72 plastic goblins.

I decided to was on sprue the plastic 28mm GW zombies I got from Stevo. The are underneath a spreu of Gripping Beast Celts I'm planning to paint up as Thugs for my Tzeentch Warband.

I figured, while I had the tub out for the zombies I'd wash the High Elves and Skaven from the 8th Ed. WFB box set I bought awhile back. I thought it was a good deal for the figures and figured to capitalize on the purge due to AoS before these became "rare" and "OOP".

I also received my first big box Kickstarter in the mail today. Blood Rage. I'll show it off soon.

Another Cross Country meet in the morning for the boy. Wish him luck.

EDIT

I keep on forgetting to welcome Brummie to the blog. He runs Brummie's Wargaming Blog and is also running the Zombtober festivities. Go check him and the other Zombtoberers out.

/EDIT

Paint Table Saturday 101 - Still Zombies and Little Orcs

Hi All,

Not super productive this last week.

Asecond layer of grey on the zombie flesh and then I got out all the various 20mm greenskins in various levels of completeness.

Hoping to get at least one Zombie and or Orc done tomorrow; but I have a kid party, track practice and a lot of tidying to do to set up for my Talomir game.

Happy painting.

Paint Table Saturday 100 and Zombtober 2015

Hi All,

Just a quick one before Cross Country.

These are the last of the 40mm Zombies and Survivor that weren't qualified for Curt's challenge because they had already been started. The survivor I call "Madonna with Knife". She looks like the Virgin Mary to me.

She was done using the sloppy drybrush in successive layers that I decided I didn't like. The Zombies look like they got the first layer of grey.

So in addition to Orktober, I'm trying to participate in Zombtober (I may be the only person who includes the b). I think you just need to post a finished Zombie/Survivor every Sunday in October.

I also plan to do Orctober, but forget what the rules are.

Later.

40mm Zombies from the AHPCV

I didn't realize it had been so long since I last posted. I had quite a few things to tell you, but got caught up in volunteering at the kids school. We had field day and I had fun timing the 600m run. I was proud of my daughter for finishing as she is a self avowed non runner.

On to the figures. First seen here.

So these are just repeats of poses I've already done. I went with a shade, mid and highlight with second highlight for the faces. I'm not really into the red and black motif on the two crazy women zombies. It is what it is.

From the back they really look too clean for zombies. I had a few hiccups with under thinned paint in the highlight layer. I ended up having to hit those bright spots with a black wash to tone them down. The grunge wash is 2 Raw Umber : 2 Burnt Umber : 2 Green : 1 Black. I add the green to make it more zombie.

A group shot of everyone to date. I only have 4 zombies and 1 survivor based and primed left to go. Unfortunately they are ineligible for the challenge, as I started some layers on them awhile back.

I was able to pull out my Comedic bonus round submission, this time with about 20 minutes to go when I hit send. Maybe, just maybe, I'll get the anti hero round in early.

Thanks for looking.

Plastic Army Men - Zombies

Hi All,

I meant to show these to you sooner, but got caught up in a very busy weekend. Here are the Survivors that I posted to the AHPCV last Friday.

These are the additional shots I took today as I was re-taking the shots of my "Hot" bonus round submission.

Four out of five available poses.

These pictures are slightly different from what I submitted to Curt. As I was retaking the "Hot" photos I wasn't liking how washed out the background was and some of the brighter colors were blowing out. So I tried dropping the Exposure Value to -1.0, I think they look better.

Jethro

 I tried to emulate a Pabst Blue Ribbon logo trucker hat on Jethro. My free hand is pretty bad and this was my second attempt. To quote Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, "Heineken! You like that shit? PABST BLUE RIBBON!"

Deputy Hogg

 Nothing to see here folks, I just went with a sheriff brown palette theme.

Campbell

 Although his pose is a little weird, and he inexplicably has no shoes, I think Ax man here is my favorite. Perhaps a little too pristine for an ax wielder in the zombie apocalypse. Oh well.

Officer Figueroa

 I almost did urban camo on this SWAT officer but I just wanted to be done by the time I got around to it.

Zombies attack!

 You may remember the zombies from Zom(b)tober, I have eight more just like them waiting to be painted. Maybe this week.

Last Stand.

The End?

This last photo I changed the F value from 16 down to 8 to blur out the Survivors in the fore ground. The focal point is the zombie in the middle.

I'd also like to take the opportunity to welcome Marga to the blog. I'm not sure how Marga came to find my blog but they write an interesting blog, in Spanish, about Egypt here. Lots of art and reference material.

And before I forget, these figures probably are those ones from Amazon that I mentioned, the reviews say they are not the ones pictured. They appear to be made by EMCE Toys who also do 4" and 8" "dolls" or action men if you prefer. I found a blog article about them here. The main draw back to using these is the lack of poses, only five each.

Zom(b)tober 3

Well, it was actually yesterday but I got these three finished today with the varnish, gore and flocking.

Since the last time was sort of 1.5 there wasn't really a 2.

I tried to do three color style but I think I fell a little flat. I need to work on anatomy for these figures that don't have sculpted musculature. I also tried to paint on folds to the flat areas of the clothes, but it just looks like stripes on the bathrobe.

So I may revisit the glaze over grey again.

The other difference was I tried some splatter effects on them. Washes didn't work, watered down paint was better.

I also have 5 more orcs about 70% done but I didn't want to hold up the zombies any longer.

Sorry for the lack of posts, been busy with kid activities.

Zom(b)orctober 1

Well, I'm either a day early for the second week of Zom(b)tober or 6 days late for the first week.

Perhaps I used too much blue on the figures to use a blue background. I also reverted to no EV compensation, as I wanted a darker look to the photo.

I base coated these Burnt Umber using Liquitex Spray Artist Acrylic. I had actually started these with some Krylon and hated it. As you may recall I dislike spray primer as I feel like I almost never achieve full coverage while also end up covering detail. The liquitex had none of those issues and I would recommend it to anyone. It is expensive $11.99 per can, but if I can speed up my prep time it's worth it to me. Note to self - Don't spray prime at dusk. It is really hard to tell if you missed a spot.

I then wanted to work with a modified grayscale technique. The idea was to build up highlights in gray and then glaze colors over that. I feel like the drybrush was not wholly successful as it got that powdery look, associated with overworked drybrushing over surfaces without much detail. I then was hit and miss with thinning the the paints. I also used two different blues on the male zombies that didn't look that different. The flesh was glazed with Italian sage, which is a light green grey. The female had a green skirt and yellow shirt. For the skin I did a modified grunge wash of 4:2:1 Green: Burnt Umber: Black wash. The rest was my standard Grunge was 4:2:1 Raw Umber: Burnt Umber: Black. I tried to be subdued with the gore. First I used a little Tamiya Clear Red mixed into some sepia ink wash. It was too brown and lifeless. I then reapplied the clear red over those areas and that helped it pop a little more. The matte varnish may have taken the shine off the clear red too much.

They came out okay but I think I will mix greys into my color palette to achieve the look instead of painting in grey and glazing. I was working on a survivor at the same time but the techniques weren't doing it for me.

Next are the Orcs.

I drybrushed up the skin on these guys and I don't think I will do that again at this scale. These guys are 1/72 scale from the Dark Alliance. Set 1 I think. As usual I played with Bronze, Copper, Gold and Silver on them, just to make them more interesting. The eye motif on the shields is my fall back. On the Bronze shield I did it backed by Burnt Umber, the steel shield is backed by black.

I also felt like trying out a little vignette with these Orcs:

Fladnag and De La Warre lead their men to fight off the green menace.

I bumped up the EV to +1 to make it brighter and adjusted the aperture to f16 to try and get the forward figures in better focus. I used digicamcontrol 1.2 to help take all the photos. I must admit to rushing this shot. I should have played with lighting and position more.

I'd also like to welcome the two latest followers:

Tiny Basement of Tiny Basement Wars and pw, who does not have a blog listed in his Friend Connect profile. TB is doing some fun Oldhammer gaming with his kids and has a great Comic style report of his Space Hulk Dungeon Bash mash up. And if pw reads this and has a link just let me know.

Hope y'all like the latest. More to come, I hope.

Otherworld Sale and updates

Hi All,

Just wanted to let you know that you still have time to avail yourself of the Otherworld Miniatures birthday sale. I saw a couple of posts about it, but the one I finally found was on Wargames News and Terrain. It expires on Oct 11th, type in 8THBIRTHDAY in the coupon code box at checkout and receive a 20% discount. I ordered the demon idol diorama pack and the discount essentially brought the shipping to 50p. Not too shabby.

I also finally got the Marauder Giant and Azhag apart. The Giant snapped of the base easily, Azhag I had to leave in the freezer for several more days. The only bad thing was snapping the peg off the plastic wing. Now if I could remember where I put the other wing.

I forgot to take a picture of it, but the wyvern has Marauder 1993 carved into his foot.

I also dug out my zombies for zombtober.

The plastic zombies and survivors are roughly 40mm I got them off Amazon (not this one but similar) and glued them to washers for the Analogue Painting Challenge last year. In the interim I knocked the box over and snapped them off the bases. It's the white glue, but I've set myself up to, in theory, back out of my basing system.

The metal zombies are the 20mm Elhiem zombie horde plus a duplicate casualty figure from the survivors set. I got these from Syr Hobbs who I wanted to give a shout out to for excellent customer service. When I placed my order they contacted me with a question about what to do for items that were out of stock. When the items did eventually come in they followed up with me. It sounds like standard practice, but so many get wrong. So I applaud them for doing it well. Their website is in transition right now but they are responsive to email.  There is a TMP post here about the delays.

Best to get basing. October 5th is the first deadline to post a zombie/survivor and in my case Greenskin as well.

Zom(b)Orctober

So I've signed on to do Zom(b)tober and Orctober this year.

I add a b because it's Zom B's!

I think I signed on to this last year, and then produced a big fat zero in the painted Zombie department. So I'm going to throw my hat in again and try to get something done. I think I saw it first on Eclectic Gentleman Tabletop Gamer and am listed 10th there, while I'm also listed on Brummie's Wargaming Blog where I'm listed 20th. I also followed Brummie's Blog today as it was one I thought I was, but actually wasn't.

I see that Brummie and EGTG each have their own logo image with the text tying it together. Using What Font Is I found it was Bloody. The only thing I don't like about FFonts is they try to get you to download their installer. I ended up doing the zip file after it downloaded the installer.

So in keeping with the whole make your own banner thing, here's mine:

I am also fully aware that I am the outlier in spelling it with a B.

Next up Orctober.

By Zhu Bajie

You can join in at Erny's Place and there looks like there's even a prize to be had.  Of course the real prize for me is actually painting all the stuff I've had lying around since 1992.

So throw caution to the wind and join one or both of these. Your lead pile will thank you.

Dice Games

Hi All,

  Had a nice visit with my cousin and her family and got in some rousing games of Zombie Dice and Cthulhu dice. Both of these games come from Steve Jackson Games and I have mentioned them before.

We have played Zombie Dice before at home and this time it was with a fairly large group. I think it was 8 people. To me this is a little too large as it slows down the game a tad. Still fun, just not as quick.

From zombiedice.sjgames.com

Cthulhu Dice, however, really shined. My son and I had tried to play just the two of us and it was meh. With a group of people at a party it is a ton of fun. My son also rigorously enforced the house rule of flipping your lip with your finger and gibbering when you lose your sanity. Good wholesome family fun with the Elder gods. We had several games where only Cthulhu won, and I suspect my brother's girlfriend may be an actual cultist.

From cthulhudice.sjgames.com

Watch out for my Analogue Hobbies painting challenge entry tomorrow.

Zombtober, Bloggery and Basing

Zombtober

Although I don't think I can fully participate, what with Talomir and Orctober taking up a lot of my time, I thought this was a good idea.

I first heard about it from Sheldrake here, but I understand that it originated here. Since most of my hobby time is spoken for right now I thought I'd just make an effort to game Zombies. I think we'll do it this way. We'll play Zombies!!!, I'll start getting my head around ATZ-FFO, and then we'll maybe try using Zombies!!! game pieces and the ATZ city deck. We'll culminate trying to use the 54mm zombies and survivors that we have. Sounds like a plan.

Around 50mm tall, green is the international color for zombies.

Bloggery

I think it was Paradox0n again who noted in passing that his stats had changed. I think he said that his page views had lowered because blogger was no longer counting bot crawls as page views. Mine have been hovering around 100 per day, more if I post, less if I don't. I've also noticed a lot more traffic sourced from google or blogger as the refferring URL, not sure what that is all about. I also received an email from Feedspot, telling me about how many new viewers were reading Talomir Tales on their feed reader. I find this odd as I am only one of about five authors on the blog and not even the admin. When I independently (ie did not follow the link on the email) tracked them down they basically look exactly like Feedly. So I'm not sure why I would change to them.

Basing

Now that push is coming to shove for finally gaming an RRtK battle with figures I'm going to actually have to work out my basing scheme. As you may recall I was going to use magnetic sheeting as stands/movement trays. They are 3.5" x 2" and I was going to use a full one for cavalry, engines and monsters while using half of one (3.5' x 1") for infantry. Well the chariots alone would not fit on a 2" deep base if I'm trying to keep the 3.5" frontages consistent. 3.5" is a frontage of about 89mm, which also begs the question if I should be playing on a larger table. I currently play with these frontages on a 4' x 3' table, but I think that size was with 40mm frontages in mind so I should probably be playing at least 6' x 4' if not 8' x 6'.

That will have to be sorted another time as I need to get this done. I'm happy to report that painting the magnets looks okay. For now I'll just paint them my base earth tone. In the future I'll experiment with some light flocking.

Still way behind.

And welcome new follower Snickit. You got stuck in the back of the followers widget because you don't have an avatar, one of the annoyances of blogger. I thought your blog was Snickit's Tale but that appears to have been deleted. I thought I was following it as well. If you have a new blog, or can resurrect that one, just let me know.

Anticipation...

or a watched hit counter never reaches 10,000.

Some of you may remember when Heinz ketchup used the Carly Simon song in an add.

So since I can't wait by not posting anything I'll tell you what will be happening once I reach 10K. To celebrate this milestone, and in honor of what some are calling Zomtober, I will be giving away a copy of Two Hour Wargames latest release: All Things Zombie - Final Fade Out (ATZ - FFO).

This is an update of their top selling Zombie skirmish game with all the newest rule mechanics etc. You may have read about on Vampifan's blog here, or Colgar6's here.

I am very excited about this title myself, and the only reason I have not bought it already is the massive shame and guilt I feel at still not having played all the other titles I own. And realistically I don't have any models made up.

Oh and if you do a search for Zomtober you may find something silly like this:

Silliness! So while I twiddle my thumbs waiting for the interwebs to take notice of my littleslice o' the net and wait for Battle Cry to come in the mail I wish you all happy gaming.

Combining my love of Obstacle racing and Zombies

I just got email notification of this race in San Diego.

http://www.thewalkingdeadescape.com/

It looks like you can try to race it or volunteer to be made up as a zombie and harass contestants. I wasn't going to race anymore until the fall, but I am sorely tempted.

Check it out.

Oops! I also forgot to welcome Shelldrake. His friend connect doesn't mention it but he has a couple of blogs. The one I like the most is his Play By Blog (PBB) one Shelldrake's Zombie Wargame Blog.

Check it out also.