Mammoth Factory - Legion of Steel Restless Corpses

Do you ever feel like your painting is going through a midlife crisis? I had the realisation recently that there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of miniatures that I want to paint. But Games Workshop’s method of basecoats, wash and highlights is frankly a slow way to paint. It yields good results don’t get me wrong but boy can it be mind numbing. And what doesn’t help is the Games  Workshop have ramped up the detail on their models in the last decade or so. I started painting my Sisters Novitiates shortly after assembling them and I’m still slowly chipping away at the base coats. If I got one glorious pound sterling for every bloody pouch I have to paint I could quit my day job. 

So I figured that I would take what I learned from testing out slapchop and see if I could find a nice balance between speed of slapchop and crisp details of the Games Workshop method. For that I needed some test subjects: enter the Legion of Steel Restless Corpses Warband by Mammoth Factory, which I purchased from their stall at the UK Games Expo this year. 

Before we got to the painting however, there was another process that I wanted to test first. A lot of my future plans involve converting to give them a more Nurgle feel, the easiest of which is to add some pustules and boils. I didn’t want to sculpt them with greenstuff, partly because I’m terrible at sculpting. And as mentioned, I would have to do it a lot. So what I did instead was drill a small divot in the model’s skin with a 1mm bit. I then (very) carefully dropped a 1mm ball bearing into the hole, using a bit of plastic glue to soften the plastic. The ball bearing was then sealed in place and blended with the skin using liquid greenstuff. 

Once the greenstuff had fully dried I stuck down a couple of Epic Basing mushrooms on the bases and primed them with Colour Forge Standard Grey. And once that was dry, I gave the models a zenithal with Liquitex Titanium White Acrylic Ink.

From there I moved onto the pre-shading. Again using the airbrush I used Daler-Rowney Sap Green and Burnt Umber inks on two each of the zombies. Typically, I would spray these from below onto the skin but for testing purposes I also sprayed some onto the clothing as well. For the last two, I initially did pre-shading with Scale75 Instant Colour Arcane Purple but this turned out to be way more muted than I had anticipated. Instead I switched to Vallejo Game Ink Violet, which was much, much more vivid. 

Thanks to the zenithal and pre-shading above my lights and shadows were already done, all I had to do now was take advantage of it. And the best way to do that was with transparent paints like Contrast or Army Painter Speedpaint. As with the Ettin, the first thing I did was to paint a small ring of Guilliman Flesh around each of the boils. Again like the Ettin, the next step was a nice even coat of Army Painter Speedpaint Malignant Green all over the skin. For the clothing I got out all the contrast and speedpaints that I thought would be suitable and just kind of went to town with them mixing and matching on different models. Honestly, this part was a lot of fun testing out the various paints and seeing how they would look on the models. With all that done, the various paints had darkened the models down quite a lot and the skin was looking very green. Rather than sink a ton of time into layering and highlighting I opted instead to give them all a drybrush of Pallid Wych Flesh. I mainly focused on the skin but I did also drybrush over the folds in the clothes where I could. For the fine detailing, all I needed to do was a small dot of Vallejo Heavy Goldbrown on the boils and a thin line of Army Painter Skeleton Bone for the teeth. To add some shadow to the mouths I ran a line of Army Painter Strong Tone into them. Additionally, to darken the eyes I added a small dot of Scale75 Instant Colour Arcane Purple to the sockets. 

With the zombies themselves done I could move onto the bases. For these I started by slathering them with Vallejo Thick Brown Mud that once dry I washed with Athonian Camoshade and drybrushed with Tyrant Skull. From there I dabbed on a few splotches of Caliban Green in places that I wanted toxic pools of goo, and then once that was dry I dabbed on some Nurgle’s Rot technical paint. To finish the bases off, I dabbed on some PVA glue then sprinkled on some Geek Gaming Scenics Base Ready Forest Ground Cover. I made sure to wait until the Nurgle’s Rot was completely dry otherwise you end up with bits in it. Finally, I dabbed on a bit more PVA glue and stuck down some static grass. 

I’m actually really pleased with how these have turned out. Excluding the bases I got them painted in a day. How long did I say I had been working on and off on the Novitiates? When I come to do zombies again, and I will be, there are a few things I would change up. The pre-shading does get very muted down by the subsequent layers, that vivid violet that I did turned into a bruised purple colour in the end. So I can firstly be much more heavy handed with my pre-shading and secondly I’ll do the rings around the boils after the Malignant Green to save them getting lost.