2016- Planning for the future

Well, this took a little while longer than I expected, so let's talk my plans for 2016!

2015 was a very successful start for my own personal zombie apocalypse, co-authoring Skirmish Outbreak, Medieval Mayhem and painting up the start of a real horde of zombies. So where to next?


Skirmish Outbreak Rules
We will continue to support Skirmish Outbreak throughout the year with further releases, but what they are is still under wraps. Suffice to say, it will involve Zombies, and it will be awesome :)

And if you are tempted to look at the rules themselves, Shelldrake has done an awesomely indepth reviews of the rules here which may help tempt you into buying a copy from skirmishoutbreak.com.


Miniatures
Well, I mostly achieved my goal last year of painting a survivor each week, plus I got an almost 2 to 1 ratio of zombies to survivors!

The plan for 2016 is to paint through the range of Studio Miniatures zombies. The lot of them. I already have a head start with the Walking Dead zombies done, as well as the Medieval Mayhem and a whole lot of their plastic zombies done too.

So it is just the 127 metal zombies to go, and that is assuming they don't release more zombies through the year for me to paint!

As for survivors, I will keep ticking my way through them, finishing at least one new survivor each month.


Terrain
This is my big goal for the year. I am desperately short of terrain to play my zombie games on and that is a real issue!

So, my goal here is to complete one terrain piece each month, like a building or other big piece. Plus I will be trying to complete other little terrain pieces through the year.

In fact, January's terrain piece has already been progressed, it no longer looks like this:

But more on that during the week!


Battle reports
Well, the resounding feedback I have had so far about my blog is that there are not enough games!

So the goal for myself then is to play one game a month, and post it up here on the blog. Should be easy enough, right? Especially when I have some cool new terrain to play on!

Right, so there is my goals for 2016 planned, lets see how I get on!

Chris

2015- A look back

Well, 2015 is done and dusted, so it makes sense to do a bit of a year in review type thing.

So, lets have a wee look at what I have managed to paint over the year.

My goal was to paint a new survivor each week, posting them up on a Friday. Was I successful? Well... no. I missed a few weeks here and there (about 6 total),but did managed to complete no less than 105 survivors!

This included 76 modern survivors:

And the 29 survivors of Medieval Mayhem:

And then as for Zombies? Well, I painted a fair few of those too- 144 in fact!

It is quite the horde when you put them all in one place!

And of course the other big Zombie thing for the year was to co-author a set of Zombie rules, Skirmish Outbreak, and to release the first supplement in collaboration with Studio Miniatures.

Right, so that is a brief look back at 2015, next post will lay out some of the plans and schemes for 2016.

Thanks to all who tuned in during 2015, I sincerely hope you enjoyed what you found! And I do hope you will tune in for the next year too...

Chris

Zombtober- My plan... (now updated with the real rules!)

So, it is October, which in Zombie blogging circles, means it is Zomb-tober.

From what I have found out, Zomb-tober is an opportunity to get a survivor or zombies done each week, as a way to force oneself to keep painting. Which, sortof doesn't work for me, because that is what I have been doing all year!

Edited: I have just spotted the ACTUAL rules- head here for more info!

"The rules

The Zomtober rules are simple. To take part you just need to paint one Zombie or Survivor (or more!) each week, in any scale you like, posting it to your blog by the Sunday (we use Sunday's as the end of each Zomtober week). So that means one or more minis each week on or before the 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th of October 2015."

So, what to do for Zomb-tober then?

I am a big fan of the book World War Z by Max Brooks. I am sure you have noticed my attempts to copy his style with the little stories I provide for the survivors each week!

So knowing that, one of his follow up books to World War Z was Recorded Attacks.

Which is a graphic novel of a series of zombie attacks throughout history. I think it is a pretty cool idea, mixing up the "modern" zombie genre in an interesting a varied way. I reckon it is really clever!

And so, my plan is to paint at least one survivor and one zombie for a different historical period each week of Zombtober. I am going to aim to post them up each Sunday (in accordance with the rules!), and I will be holding off on the Friday Survivors while I work through October. I am going to finish the last of the Walking Dead Wednesday, and then take a break from that as I focus on making zombies for this challenge!

Right, so there is the plan. Week One's historical period?

World War II

:)

So what are you going to work on this Zomb-tober?

CP

Walking Dead Wednesdays 1: Beginnings and Zombies

It seems like it is all go here on the blog at the moment!

With the arrival of the Studio Miniatures pack last week, I decided to stage my painting out for it, so that I will be able to keep up with my other painting goals.

Right- so what is the plan then? Well, Walking Dead Wednesdays will be me working my way through the miniatures which I got from Studio Miniatures, plus whatever else I think of Walking Dead related on a Wednesday.

Sound good?

So to get us started, here is the little girl zombie from the kickstarter. This is her from the show:

Image owned by AMC, taken without permission for this blog.

And this is my take on the miniature:

So, as you can see, I changed the colour palatte a bit, mainly because I don't have a good pink-ish colour. I decided to use the yellow simply because I don't really use yellow a lot at all, which will make her stand out, and plus it was one of the few nice pastel colours which I have readly to hand.

The sculpting on the zombie is excellent (as is, on the whole the whole set actually), in fact if I was being critical, it is probably too good, a bit too realistic!

So all in all, a lovely sculpt, really impressed with the quality Studio Miniatures are bringing to the table here.

Next on the Walking Dead Wednesdays is Rick and Zomb-rick!

Back- with a plan!

So, I am back.

Or I am at least trying to get myself back into the swing of it!

Moving, house buying and all those other things are more or less done, it is time for me to try and get my painting mojo back.

To get me started, I splashed out and bought a new figure for this week's survivor:

Obviously he needs a little bit of work, but it can't be that hard to paint one figure in an evening right?

Challenge Accepted.

CP

Beginnings and welcomes

First off, welcome!

Like probably everyone, I have been aware of the Zombie genre for some time. I remember watching the Romero movies when I was growing up, and I remember them freak me out! It didn't help that I watched them when I was probably a bit too young- I can thank my older brother for that I suppose!

Over time I moved away from fantasy and sci-fi, ending up focusing very much on historicals, especially World War Two.

And like that I kept muddling along.

It wasn't until I found Max Brooks' World War Z that I remembered just how much I liked the concept of the Zombie. Which naturally meant I started reading a whole lot of Walking Dead comics, catching up on the Zed movies I had missed, such as 28 Days Later, and reacquainting myself with the mythos of the Zombie. And rereading World War Z again and again.

So why the blog then?

Well, I have decided to start gaming the Z apocalypse in 28mm. It has taken me a while to get out of Historicals, but I have decided to make the jump, and start my own Zombie apocalypse.

So, the plan is to paint a single survivor each week, and share them on here. That will be in addition to musings and other such thinking around all things Z, you never quite know where it will end up!

So as a way of a start, last night while watching the Walking Dead mid season finale, I assembled some Studio Miniatures Zeds...

Believe it or not, I didn't have to pause. It was actually just fortuitous timing!

And this is what they looked like in the light of day, fully assembled.

But more on them in the future once they are painted- they have now been undercoated.

As for this weeks survivor, she will be up later this week!

Chris