Collins builds the world of the walking dead

and with that the Atlanta camp crew were done!

the stand out here for me is Carol’s jumper, I love the green colour that is Warp Lightning

****EDIT****

nope… not done… just found Billy and Ben the children of Allen and Donna still left to do. so close, I feel like one of those marathon runners that celebrates before crossing the line only to be pipped at the post by second place! BOO!

two more to go! two more to complete the Atlanta camp then its GAME TIME!

During a UHH I did a quick paint job on Donna, again a mix of standard and contrast paints.

Im not certain I like the look of contrast on things like shirts, works well on hair and shoes though. just got to pick your target area well, for me I think I prefer the harder shadow areas you get for manually highlighting, the problem I have is not having the appropriate matches in standard paint vs contrast.

I am rapidly approaching the Atlanta camp followers being complete and we’ll soon be on for another run of battle reports! I can’t wait, I’m enjoying the games and excited for the story that will be created! (remember Rick is still in a pickle atm!)

If you’re a depressed mechanic who’s just lost his whole family I expect you’d wear a chequered shirt too! or maybe you’re the kind of person who wears them all the time (like me).
Either way they’re a pain to paint and make look good.
It requires a steady hand and well thinned paint (or paint pens if you are fancy)
all in all this took me in the region of 1 hour 38 mins to complete, the length of this weekends weekender show. contrasts were used on the hat, trousers and shoes to speed up the process and remove the need for highlighting too much.
The shirt was simply painted with the pattern and then VERY selective glazing into what I thought should be folds in the shirt or around the pocket details. nothing fancy really as the pattern is the highlights for this shirt.

Interestingly the contrast used on the trousers here worked out a lot better than on Dale’s jacket in my opinion, perhaps some colours simply are better suited to the contrast medium than others.

the rest of him is traditional painting although the dark jacket hasn’t been highlighted in any way.

The baseball cap has a mixture of base wash and highlight but also selective wash removal on the high areas then a very simple steady hand to write on ‘police’ in white paint.

Everyone in the apocalypse needs someone to act as overwatch and the Atlanta group have an old bloke called Dale.

he was done using just contrast on his jacket, im trying to find a nice quick way to get some areas done. its not as highlighted as id like but it was quick

Sorry for the lack of content over the last little while. I’ve been out of action with the dreaded nursery plague.

The next character for Rick to meet will likely be glenn so it was about time he got a lick of paint.

The interesting bit on him is his hat that took a little bit of free handing to get the pattern drawn out. other than that however, he is pretty basic with solid colours, base, wash and layer highlights.

Lori in the comic and show wears chequered shirts, primarily lilac or purple ones according to the internet.

I cheaped out on the walkers and didn’t do anything interesting for their shirts (just solid colours and strong tone dip) but you can’t do that for the living!

as such I tried my hand at adding a pattern to her shirt. to colours of purple and a fine tipped bush and we had a pattern. it loses all the folds in the shirt as its really hard to paint in a manner that keeps all the little folds present but I tried.

She came out alright in the end and is certainly done to a tabletop standard. even if she is suffering from the BIGGEST of eyebrows.

#done

To make up for having to paint two models in one (horses and riders count as separates!) I decided to start painting the Grimes family, starting with Carl, he is half sized after all!

Nice simple scheme of blue jeans, red soft-shell jacket and of course Rick’s police hat.

Nice simple, base, wash and layer highlight.

I think I’m getting the hang of when to use contrast and when to use paint, somethings just work better as contrast (hair) and others not so much.

As Rick failed to get any petrol from Dinogas he’s going to have to ditch his car and find another mode of transport. This is playing out just like the comics so far just with more death and injuries than we initially saw.

This means painting up ‘Rick on a Horse’ model, one from the range that kinda doesn’t have much of a place in the game until more horse models were released. a few people made some amazing dioramas using it back in the day though.

I painted Rick the same way I painted the dismounted Rick. The horse I painted with contrast paint, specifically guilliman flesh.

thinned down with medium to make it quite pale and applied thinly to identify the very basic muscular lines etc. then filled in the lines with deliberate brushstrokes and tried adding shade or depth where I felt it needed it before finally giving another coat of thinned contrast just to bump up the colour on the raised areas.

The tail and mane were done using gore-grunta fur which is a lovely colour for brown hair.

I bought a mystery terrain crate hoping to get shed loads of the walking dead stuff they made but for a quarter the price. I mostly got a hit! pretty happy with that transaction really.

All the scatter on here is mantic terrain crate and has been painted using citadel contrast paint. very quick, very easy and good enough for it to represent the Atlanta camp should Rick get there alive, baring in mind the poor lad didn’t do well in the last episode where he tried to get fuel from DinoGas…

With this finishing steps I broke out the collection of static grasses and some superglue. there are 6 types of static grass on here as variety is the spice of life. I then put the moorland and wet gorse grasses in the middle Y (I have plans to recycle this side) and on the higher areas I stuck to summer colours and wild shrub grasses.

These were mainly all from gamers grass, they’re stuff is really good and I’d recommend them, they do need sticking down with superglue however unlike the games workshop tuffs which have a nice ‘never dries’ gel medium they’re fixed in that’s super sticky. I do like the GW tuffs for this reason, very simple to use.

It’s interesting how the different flocks have interacted on this at the pre and post sealing stage.

Before sealing everything was quite vibrant and had a lot of different height. Then when sealing all the dyes in the wooden flocks have merged and muted each other down. the really dark one has somehow become really visible and strong.

the lighting is different to be fair, one day was sunny and the other overcast so that might be affecting it a bit.

Those that paid attention at the beginning know that I made 2 bases with the nailgun of hobby glory… well now its time to maximise the second one.

What I’ve figured out is that the board actually has 2 sides… so given that they’re basically a one and done board (all that effort for one game!! hope you appreciate the storyline project) Ive decided to halve my material costs by doing one normal board and one on the slightly smaller interior of the underside. besides being cheaper it means I might also be able to experiment with resins or making boggy ground etc and have it all contained (hopefully!)

As we are coming close to adding more characters to the story I think it is time to build the big meeting place where a number of ‘events’ could happen. A camp!

first thing I did was add some polystyrene as some landform. this was glued down using gorilla glue (the brown expanding foam glue). simply add to one side and then add water to the other side to be glued and then put the two together and add some weight, I used books and spray cans etc.

To join the layers I beveled some of the edges using a mega sharp scalpel and laid on some sculptamold (or home made modelling compound).

One spot I left a sheer edge so that I could use up some old plaster rocks that I had knocking about (this project is in spring clean after all so using old stock is the point!)

before doing any other painting on the board I ‘leopard spotted’ the plaster rocks.

this is super simple, it involves VERY! watered down paint, you can see in the black cup that there is excess paint that was not mixed into the water.

first apply liberal amounts of the orange and yellow earth tones (use whatever earth tones you want that might blend well with your planned ground form) then give very light layers on black wash to taste.

it is super easy to overdo the black so do not be worried about water that one down a lot. I think I went a little heavy on this one but its ok.

I might go back over it with a drybrush to try and tie it all together.

All the white ground then got a coat of raw umber brown. this is not necessary but is insurance against me mucking up the next ground form step.

The ground form texture is a 2:1 ratio of soil and brown tilegrout. once the paint is dry I simply slaver PVA everywhere I want soil and sieve on the mixture to create a nice even but random covering. in the past I’ve built up little mounds with this to make it ‘not flat’ but I didn’t in this instance because I was deliberately not careful with the sculptamold, and, in the past when it drys it has occasionally gone very chalky and fragile.

to seal it all down I used two things,

ISO to act as a flow agent sprayed onto the board through a windowlene spray bottle after the ground cover is laid down, this helps the PVA/water mix (again sprayed via windowlene spray bottle) flow into all the little cracks and bind everything together.

Left to dry for a few hours this is the result.

At this stage you could start adding your greens and browns for grass etc but life got in the way so you’ll have to wait till next time for that.

if you want to read about what the OTT team thought about this project you can find their thoughts here.

sorry not sorry for the shameless flex post with no hobby content!

Everyone should go and read my battlereport project to see the first instalment of The Walking Dead

way back when the game was still new Battlesystems had a kickstarter to create urban apocalypse terrain in their cardboard solution.

This is flat packable, fully coloured and not that expensive. If you ignore that its all cardboard and covered in clips it is a quick(ish) way to build a small TWD table.

Ive laid this out as a generic sub-urban area that a police officer would possibly live in.

We now have enough for a battle report or two. Keep an eye out for another project coming soon!