Undead Army Project (I)

As I couldn’t wait any longer for my Kings of War 2nd Edition Kickstarter to arrive, I bought a couple of Undead units to start painting them. Including this ghoul unit led by the mysterious (and nasty looking) Ghast.

Usually, when chosing a faction for a game I always tend to go with the good races, specially if there are dwarves or samurai. When I backed the latest Kings of War Kickstarter I wanted a Mega Army, as they were some amazing deals, but didn’t want to go with the dwarves. I already have more than enough dwarven miniatures to build an army.

I considered Goblins as an option, as I always liked them. They made sense as natural enemies of the dwarves (and I’m also a big fan of the goblins from the Labyrinth movie). I like Mantic’s goblin designs, but I’ve read that they’re some of their worst plastics (they switched manufacturer or something with these). The bad material used on Mantic’s own Deadzone was enough to put those minis at the very bottom of my painting queue, so I didn’t want to risk it again.

In the end I went with the Undead. Which I think are some of their better looking miniatures (and all the reviews I read about their plastics were good).

So as the excitement levels for KoW grew I couldn’t wait any longer and I bought a couple of units (as you can never have enough corpses in your army, right?). A unit of skeletons and this unit of ghouls led by Ghast, a limited miniature (which you shouldn’t have any trouble buying at the moment, even if it’s from 2012 or 2013).

I haven’t been able to find any rules for Ghast. Maybe he didn’t make the cut from 1st to 2nd edition? Or being a limited figure there weren’t any to begin with? I don’t know, if anyone knows the answer, please, comment bellow.

Mantic has really been pushing the multibasing or mini-diorama bases and I’m sold on the concept. One of the things I liked about KoW was that there wasn’t single model removal and the bigger bases allow you to add more character, after all.

First thing I did was drill a couple of holes on the sides of the base to place some magnets. I use magnets on my bases to transport almost all of my minis. I added a couple of terrain features and blended all using Vallejo Textures. The road on the back of the base is from a Basius 2 pad. The rocks are a mould I made with Blu-Stuff.

At first, my idea was to glue the miniatures to the MDF base and cover it all with Vallejo Texture to blend the miniature’s bases. I find it funny that Mantic promotes so much the multibasing with Kings of War when their miniatures come already attached to a base, making them some of the more troublesome miniatures for it. Luckily, they seem to have learned and newer miniatures come without a base attached to their feet.

Then I saw this video from Mantic and decided to clip the bases off as they would look much better (unless I destroyed their feet in the process).

To paint most of the Ghouls I placed them on old paint pots with Blu-tack as I always do, but I decided to do a small test with three of them and use white glue to stick them to a depressor. It’s how I paint now my 10mm units, and it takes way less space than having 15-20 minis of the same unit on paint pots.

Ghast himself is a metal torso you glue to regular plastic ghoul legs. As he had trouble staying on a paint pot, I airbrushed him carefully, painted the whole of the unit base and then glued Ghast to the base to continue painting him with a brush.

The unit paintjob is a fairly simple and quick one. My goal was to have pale skin, but in multiple shades, so I divided them in three groups and started by airbrushing dark blue, green or red on the shadows. After applying a couple of lighter tones of the corresponding colour, I wasn’t happy with the results.

I used a pale greenish mix for all the miniatures to try and unify their appearance. And worked from there on the whole unit. Then I used brown and black candy colours (mostly brown) on some areas of the shadows, but keeping some of the blue, green or red shadows. This way I ended up with some variations on the skin tones but without the huge differences between colours that I had at first.

After that it was only a matter of blocking the clothes, knives, iron claws and other small details and applying a couple of washes to the whole of the miniature, taking more care with the faces. Then I painted the eyes and teeth, added a black wash to the claws and some rust effects to the metal areas. Ghast followed the same process, but taking more time on each step.

Once I reached this stage, it was time to varnish the miniatures and after that have some fun with the blood effects. I used Tamiya Clear Red with a little bit of black paint.

Before gluing the minis to the base I added a little bit of grass to it. I painted a total of 17 miniatures, but in the end only used 15 as the base looked good enough that way. That leaves me with a couple of already finished miniatures for the next unit of Ghouls.