The Walking Dead – A tale of boot camps and laughter

Mantic Points well spent. ?

I had always wanted this mini since I saw it on the bootcamp.

The studio painted minis were produced from a case and laid out for everyone there to see. There were sculpts we wouldn’t see for a wave or two and this guy caught my eye.

For whatever reason I missed the opportunity to buy this mini first time around so was thrilled to find it in the Mantic Points section of the store recently.

Used the gel glue gore technique I saw online years ago.

Roughly speaking it goes like this…

The nozzle of my UHU glue tube was applied to the mini’s chin, a delicate pressure was applied to produce a small gob of glue (an imperial gob, not metric… a third of a grain of rice size?), then I moved the nozzle slowly away from the chin, maintaining a strand of glue between nozzle and chin, and finishing the strand by wiping the nozzle off carefully on the deer’s wound. Hopefully when you remove the tube you will have left a strand in place. It can be fiddly. As long as you are relatively quick if you apply way too much glue or the glue strand doesn’t want to detach and gets glue everywhere etc. you can just wipe the glue way without it causing to much damage to the paint job. (Or you could be smarter than me and do it immediately after priming and just paint around it until you do the gore.) If it looks too delicate / too slim of a strand you can bulk it up with some PVA and paint. Without paint the strand will dry relatively clear and on the right model can be a cool drool effect without even adding paint.

Maggie. Nice to paint and looking forward to tagging her up with Glen at some point in game. ?

I used Contrast paints as a base for the trousers, belts, hair and the gun.

The shirt is Zandri Dust, a wash of Agrax, with a white and Zandri mix highlight.

A wash of Camoshade on the trousers after a Death Guard Green highlight.

I will add the labels to some of these characters, including Maggie, soon. I found the printed names sheet during a bit of a tidy up.

This kit has been pushed around in piles of papers, boxes and from room to room, maybe even survived a house move without being assembled.

It was given to everyone as part of the bundle at the bootcamp by 4Ground. I felt guilty that I never got around to building it. I initially didn’t feel it meshed well with all the other urban and city terrain we were given, but now I can see that with just a few additional pieces this will actually be a great piece for custom scenario.

It was easy to build. The instructions were great. Once assembled and glued together it was ready to play, but I stained the roof with a diluted mixture of Citadel washes and some Snakebite Leather Contrast and added leaf litter as I thought the pale fresh wood slates, though maybe accurate, just didn’t look right to me.

This mini is from the initial Maggie expansion blister and apparently the walker is based on a Walking Dead mega fan Eddy Brennan. I shared my efforts on Mantic’s The Walking Dead Fanatics Facebook page and Eddy annouced that this mini was based on him and shared a picture of a clear plastic prototype Mantic had sent him.

After the first pics I went back and added Warlord Games Japanese tank decals to give the look of a Japanese cult metal band t-shirt. ?

Used a sticky bread bag tie for the white strap over the cardboard. For extra realism yourself try to wrap it around the pallet too. (oops, forgot that myself. )

Just cut up cardboard and sellotape for the shrink wrapped delivery and coffee stirrers for the pallet.

The bin bags are just black corner shop plastic bag, cut into squares and gathered up into a scrunch and tied off with thread. For the contents of the bags I used dried paint from citadel pot tops. It isn’t too light or heavy and it is a way of getting your money back from wasted paint. ?

Also began to systematically add leaves to all my terrain.

And i also have a comparison for you below.

Contrast Paints on the right Police gun bag and conventional paints on the left.

Ultramarine Blue and Black Templar mainly, with some silver and gold for the metal elements.

I have bought the Humble Bundle website Walking Dead comics bundle which gives be about 30 or more of the comics. ?

I am only about 4 volumes in so far. Haven’t met Wes yet. Don’t remember Wes from the TV series either. I think Wes is African American by the features and the image on the stats card and perhaps I haven’t gone dark enough on the skintone. I used Darkoath Fleshshade over the Israeli Sand primer then a Mournfang Brown and Bugman’s Glow mix as a heavy highlight.

For Tyreese i used my normal go to of Black Red from Vallejo, but i won’t go back and change Wes unless it bugs me more.

Until he went in the photo booth I thought he was more brown. I think I will leave him with this skin tone anyway.

Mantic Games had a sale on and low price free postage cost, so I picked up a two blister bundle that I wanted and decided to paint up Glenn in his riot gear and a riot gear walker first.

I used my standard prison basing. Some hard waring green municipal style screed. With broken prison wall rubble on the walker bases and no white rubble on the survivors bases.

I used brush on Vallejo Israeli Sand primer and left it over night to dry.

I used Contrast paints for most of the model, Black Templar and Turquoise, with Nulin Oil wash for both models. No highlight for the walker to try and suggest more grime. Glenn had Macragge Blue highlight over most of the padding. Vallejo Medium skin tone for the flesh highlight, after some Darkoath Contrast as a base skin colour over the sandy coloured primer.

For some reason i ended up with three green pickup trucks. No idea why. Can’t even think it was down to priming them that way. With the potential for lights on top (turquoise and red contrast over silver) law enforcement seemed the way to go. ?