ZOMBIES ! - I survived the Apoculyps...

Alright, I've just realised the life of a necromancer might actually be VERY tiring. 

How do I know that ? Well you might have seen my brother James and I engaged in a stupid penis measurement challenge earlier.

In short, we were to each paint 8 sci-fi undead from Mantic and the winner would be whoever could come up first with his models done.

Now I fully know it was a foolish move from the start to challenge a man who is able to combine quality and quantity with ease but after all, you only get better by challenging the best !

Aaaand that's how I WON !
Just take a look at the progress report on the Scale Creep and drink the tears of sorrow of those who failed, I've just taken a bath in them so they should still be warm..

If you're more into how it all happened, here's the story :

The sprue is quite fun and it's a change from GW's where you always end up with half the parts spare at the end, this time, the process was pretty straightfowrad and I actually diversified the mix with GW a ghoul head and other bits I can't remember the origin of.

Anyway, given the look of the bits, I decided to divide the models in to roughly 3 factions :

The undead military/protection force :

Those were quite easy enough to spot, I gave them the armoured parts and the legs with gear. The dark blue and grey uniform mean they should look good as regular defense forces turned undead. 

The mad scientists/lab guys :

I like to imagine that one of those 2 is actually the one that carelessly dropped a certain virus sample that turned the whole area into an apocalyptic scene. Just to make them stand from the rest, I've given them a very identifiable colour scheme with complementary blue and orange colours.

Last 2 are some regular civilians (I didn't intend for both to be female but that's just the bits I had left). The one on the right has a sort of running gag of mine since every time I've painted zombies (and that's actually only the third), I've modelled a zombie holding his own head.

Painting wise you can see the standard was set very low with as few steps as I could and an extensive use of weathering to hide it. Most colours were only treated with a base coat, wash and one highlight (no more than 2) and the skin was just made with washes thrown on a light base until I was happy with the results. I tried to make details pop a bit and blacklined a fair bit to make the models sufficiently readable despite the messy job.
All in all I find the result quite pleasing and I have to say I'm quite happy to have managed to finished them.
From the undercoated state, it took me about 3 sessions of respectively 1, 0.5 and 4 hours to get the job done. The last session lasted longer than I would ever spend on one go (just paused to eat some instant noodles) and though it was pleasing to have them done, the process was too stressful for me !

Now the second thing I'm really happy about is that this starts a project I've been really excied about for some time... Just look at my banner and see what it's all about... Undead yes, with space elements too.
I've already started working on a proper necromancer (in January actually) and I have plans for an apprentice too, I'll also have plenty of other (un)deadly recruits to have a space undead force soon enough.