Ah, 'tis the season of year-end review blog posts! Much like last year, I am going to continue to focus on what I did not finish, versus what I did finish. After all, if you want to see what I painted, it's all (mostly) up on the blog.

First things, first, I did finish a few of the projects from last years list: the Lord of Worms, the dark future car, and the Magewraith Throne.

Unfortunately, there are still a few projects that I didn't touch during the entire year! You may recognize these two as being in exactly the same state as last year:

As I've said before, I tend to paint in batches. It's hard for me to work on less than about 4 models at once, unless it's a really large scale project (like the Lord of Worms, a model I will show off soon). And as I mentioned in my Zombies of Karr-Keel post, I was only painting two of them at a time. So I stuck in one modern plastic zombie for Frostgrave and one Oldhammer zombie per group to push the numbers up. The flesh recipes were the same as the ones previously mentioned. I did go heavier on the weathering powders to simulate rust on the weapons. I intentionally left these models very dirty and sloppy; they're zombies after all!

The other thing you'll notice is the face of the sickle wielding zombie and the scythe blade look a bit funny. My basement isn't the driest location on earth so I have to keep a heat source handy to help models dry a little faster. Unfortunately, I forgot about these two and they melted a little. Thankfully, if any model can survive a little melting, it's a zombie! The scythe blade just looks even older and more decrepit, while I made sure to slater the sickle zombie's face with more gore to hide to lack of detail.

Finally, a special word goes to the final zombie pictured. Between his shirt and the haircut and bonnet, it looks like they guy met his doom while he was doing a little bit of "roleplaying," if ya know what I mean. Even fantasy humans have fetishes, I guess!

My intention is to mostly use these for the Thaw of the Lich Lord campaign, as my interests in Frostgrave lie towards the necromantic end of the spectrum. I've got a bunch more to get done eventually as well as some skeletons and some of the lovely plastic cultists I ordered that arrived with the most recent Nickstarter.

However, I do intend to use these with Age of Sigmar as well, hence the musician. That, and I am extremely amused by the idea of a zombie using a severed leg as a drum stick.

So I've seen a lot of other bloggers doing an end of the year review for 2016 and I wanted to get in on that action. However, I wanted to do something a bit different. Where a lot of other bloggers have shown everything they painted or focused on stuff that was painted but did not feature on their blog, I wanted to showcase the stuff I started but didn't finish, since virtually everything I painted in 2016 has been shown off here (or it will be over the course of my next few blog posts!).

First up, is a Chaos Lord for my modern-hammer chaos army. I've named this chap the Lord of Worms and he's born aloft by a horde of Nurglings. As you can see, the Nurglings are pretty much done and the bulk of the lord is converted. He needs some more work though, as I have a lot planned for him.


The fact that this model isn't finished yet makes me sad. I converted it as a test model for Dark Future about two or three years ago. This year, I put the base coat down. Next I have to apply chipping medium and then the paint. Part of the problem is I can't decide what color I want the top coat to be!
Although this is a GW kit, it's intended for use in Frostgrave. The throne and platform are finished and I've done the gap filling on the two gargoyles on the side, but haven't sanded them flat yet. Once that is done, it's ready for paint!

So with the Kingdom Death Kickstarter this year, it reminded me that I still haven't touched my stuff from the original Kingdom Death Kickstarter! So I decided to start working on the Adam model that with my pledge. At this point he's mostly built. I've got a slight gap on one of the wrists to finish and I need to prep his spear and shield and he'll be ready for paint as well.

And finally (and I apologize for the lighting, resin is hard to photograph with my crappy phone), a townhouse from Table Top World. As you can see, the bottom level is complete. I want to add some stucco textures to the upper levels and I have to figure out how best to attach the porch piece so that I can use the inside of the building.

So there you go, hopefully I'll finish these projects in 2017!

I've got a short post-christmas blog post today. I figure lousy of you are off enjoying family and presents and too busy to read my boring blog!

So I've managed to avoid having to buy to many models for Frostgrave, and that is one of the things I like about the game--I already have everything I need. But when the Forgotten Pacts Nickstarter was started I couldn't help but sign up for the Plastic Barbarians. At this point, anyone who's interested in them has seen the sprues already, so I won't bore people with pictures of that.

My verdict is that these models are great. The scale is perfect, they aren't mammoth like GW stuff, but they have enough exaggeration that they are easy to paint in a way that true 25mm models can lack. This is especially true with the eyes; I find true 25mm models have impossible to paint eyes!

I've also read a lot of people that say that the official Frostgrave models don't scale well with heroic scale models. But, at least with the barbarians, I don't find this to be true at all. I thought they fit in quite well. A tad bit smaller, but nothing that makes them stick out. I think the aforementioned exaggerations help a lot with that.

The aesthetics of the barbarians are one of my favorite part of the models, they look like barbarians, but not like cartoons. That's the problem I have with the plastic Chaos Marauders, they look like professional wrestler characters, not actual barbarians. Sure, these models probably would be out of place in a historical game as they don't appear to be patterned after any particular historical peoples. But whomever they're modeled after, these guys look weathered and hard lived. I was pretty amazed at how much character and expression they have in their faces. You can tell they've lived hard lives and those hardships have etched their faces.

It's not just their faces that are well sculpted, most everything is. These models look like they're wearing clothes that have been repaired, scavenged, and make-shift. The weapons are menacing. The posing of the bodies is excellent. There is only one problem I found with the sculpting: the fur. The fur is very shallow. And that made it difficult to paint. But now that I know to expect that, I can compensate when I paint more.

As far as the sprues are concerned, these are great too. They come with tons of options including missle weapons, two-handed weapons, hand weapons, shields, and more heads than you can ever use. The only downside is that you get 4 of the same sprue of five bodies. But with all the options previously mentioned, that's not a bid deal. They also come off their integral bases really, really easily. I think it took less than a minute with my razor saw to remove them and with no damage to the shoes. However, I did find one problem with the sprue as well. As can be seen in the picture below, the weapons that require both hands were very difficult to line up right. I've gotten used to the recent Games Workshop plastics, where many of these types of arms are a single piece with both arms attached to the weapon and they slide perfectly on. As you can see below, the bottom of the axe haft isn't really in his left hand--it just kind of sits below his hand.

That said, those were the only two things I didn't like about these models. They are excellent. I know if I wanted to do an Oldhammer Norse army, I would uses these as my basis.

But enough rambling, It's time for a quick picture. I do want to apologize for the paint job below, I'm not particularly proud of it, or even happy with it. I was trying to get the model done quickly and it was time to replace my brush but I wanted to get just a little more out of it. As such, the tip wasn't as fine as it should have been and a lot of the model looks spotchy and dirty almost as if parts had been drybrushed.



And now for the Zombie I mentioned in the title. Way back on my old warseer thread, I posted a picture of my Frostgrave warband with a zombie that had no snow on its base as I had forgotten to base him with the rest of the warband. Well no longer! He is now fully based!