Zombicide: Black Plague - Runners

Continuing my plan of having a fully painted tabletop game, here are the Runners from Zombicide painted up, all fourteen of them.

Runners are fantastic pieces in the game and by the simple virtue of having two actions instead of one, they make you rethink a number of cunning plans as they can be on you considerably quicker than expected if they gain an extra activation from the card.

Despite them being great on the table, I didn't enjoy painting these and think it shows. Not happy with them, but want them gone. Couldn't tell you the reason why I didn't, as the sculpts are perfectly fine, but I've literally dashed through them and feel glad they're off the desk and on to the board.

The original plan was to have different base colouring for each monster type, but after a little thinking I've opted to paint the base rims red, same as the Fatties. I realised it's easy to distinguish between Runners and Fatties, and as there'll inevitably be expansion boxes, having the monsters from the core game with the same base colour probably makes more sense, so if they release a box of toxics they'll get green and so on. The vanilla Zombie Walkers, Necromancers and Abominations will get boring black bases. Mmm, vanilla.

What's next? Well, I'm finally biting the bullet and finishing up my last two Fishermen for Guild Ball - about a year after starting the project. After painting a lot of tabletop quality recently, I'm looking forward to doing something a little more complex!

Pink Horrors of Tzeentch (and their Yellow cousin)

Fun start to the month. My plans were thrown aside when my eldest daughter declared she'd like to learn how to paint. At the tender age of five, I thought it best to start simple, so pulled some very old figures out of storage and cleaned them up. Behold a few original Pink Horrors of Tzeentch.

They're having a bath of nail polish remover to rid them of their old skins, as this is how they came when buying them on eBay many moons ago. Three layers of paint on the poor things, so I'm sure the Changer of Ways would approve of this transformative soup. But then a spanner in the works ...

"Daddy, what are these called?"

"These are Pink Horrors, sweetie."

"Okay ... I want to paint mine yellow."

*sound of my left eye twitching*

... and lo, the Great Conspirator messes with my head once again. But not the end of the world! We kept the painting simple, literally just main colours then a thin red wash to complement the beak.

One of my brood sitting still for nearly two hours in itself would be an achievement, but having something to show for it is remarkable. She wants to come back and add pink bracelets in the future, but it's now matt varnished so she can handle it without fear of rubbing off any of the paint she's applied so far.

While the daughter was cracking on with hers, I painted up its companions in a similar style but with the right colours, damnit. So it was application of base colour (Squid Pink) then literally just thin washes of purple, red and blue over various areas. This is also the first time I've used cork for basing and it's great stuff! My first go isn't too grand, but with a little more practice it'll make a solid and quick basing technique for ad-hoc projects.

Sadly my trusty daylight lamp is irretrievably broken and I had to use the camera flash for lighting, which isn't too great. The bottom right fellow, who I've nicknamed Gumby is probably my favourite, but they're lovely sculpts. While it's not the best output I've produced, it's not often you get the kids wanting to join in on hobbies and high on the fun scale. I hope she does want to give it another go, as it was a real blast.

There'll probably be a small pause in painting in the next couple of weeks as I've got a new job (hooray!) and want to throw myself into that when it starts later this week.