Rangers of Shadow Deep - Ninjilly's DayKnight 30 Day Project

From watching games on Guerrilla Miniature Games on YouTube (link to a playlist of all Ash’s RoSD games), I knew that I needed zombies but not wanting to spend any more meant I had to put up with what I have. I know that CMON get a lot of credit for their minis but the Black Plague zombies are a real mix of quality. There are a lot of them though!

I like the shamblers and the fatties so I picked out some and jumped into trying out Vince Venturella’s speed painting with inks method because I want to give it a shot for my Kings of War dwarves later on.

First you prime black, then grey at a 45 degree angle and then top down on the model with white to give a three tone zenithal effect.

I forgot to document the rest of the process but I didn’t like it. The fault lies with me – I didn’t go heavy enough with the grey and as a result there were far too many black areas left so the inks just looked weak. I also realised that most of the colours were too bright for how I wanted my medieval zombles to look. I beat myself up a bit for wasting time so early on in the project thing but then facebook of all things helped me out. That timehop crap popped up with a Neil Gaiman quote I had posted a few years ago about making mistakes

I’ll come back to the method in the future but in the mean time, I grabbed another handful of zombles and went back to what I know.

1. Prime grey
2. Block out colours (skin is Army Painter Necrotic Flesh; clothing is meant to be peasantry so I wanted to stay away from blues and went with Vallejo Russian uniform, English uniform, Cavalry Brown and Revell Leather Brown)
3. Wash (Games Workshop Athonian Camoshade for the skin and GW Agrax Earthshade over everything else)
4. Highlight (only did one pass of this with the original colours because I was starting to run out of week, I can always come back for a step up edge highlight if I have time left over in a future week)
5. Bases black but I might change this to brown by the end of the project, I won’t be properly basing at this point because they are still a board game mini and I don’t know how I’m going to find RoSD. If I love it then I’ll come back when I have more time.
6. Skeleton bone dots in the eyes – I hate the look of this but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
7. GW technical paint Blood for the Blood God to final touches (I did these last two stages too late to get photos)

I’m happy with how they all turned out in the end – decent table quality and probably the most models I’ve managed to paint in a short space of time in well over a year. Like I said in the step-by-step, if I like the game, I’ll come back and go back over a couple of things on these guys. I forgot to do the mouths, to finish the hair, and I hate the eyes (hello New Year’s resolution candidate!).

The mess up with the speed painting method threw me a bit so I didn’t have time to bash into the heroes as well which had been my original plan. I think I’m going to break them up into three groups so that I can just get through two a week and still get them all done by project end.