Zombicide Progress: Heroes – Volume 8 (Watts, Phil, & Bill)

In the continuation of my Zombicide Characters: Brown Edition, I’m going to wrap the last three of the figures I’d identified as the most brown colored: Watts, Phil, & Bill.

Watts:

It always strikes me as odd to see a Zombie using a gun–more so when their human side doesn’t have a ranged weapon.  Zombies are supposed to epitomize brainless walking dead: shambling forth towards their prey.  I guess this represents the fact that these guys aren’t technically zombies–yet.  Instead, they’re people that have been bitten and are undergoing the transformation but still have reasonable control of their faculties.  Otherwise, why would more zombies still try to bite them?

Yeah, that must be it.

One thing that always struck me as odd about Watts in particular is the photo on the card.  Is he wearing tighty-whities, or is his t-shirt just tucked into his pants in an odd way?  That doesn’t come through on the figure like it does the card…

Phil:

I like the way Phil came out.  That seems weird to say, since I always seem to have some sort of negative comment about my paint jobs.  I think the color scheme matches fairly closely to the figure (though it’s a very basic scheme of browns, so it’s hard to mess it up).

I will mention here that some people like to paint figures with a unique twist.  I bring it up for Phil because a guy I’ve known for years has a copy of the game, and he also happens to work in the correctional system.  As such, he’s taken to painting Phil to look more like his uniform for work.  I get it, it’s a cute twist, but I’ve decided to stay true to the color scheme on the cards.  That way when people see the card they can easily recognize their miniature on the table.

Bill:

I guess this is supposed to be a character from the TV show Deadwood.  Most of those references are lost on me.  Frankly, he reminds me of Javier Bardem’s character in “No Country for Old Men” more–though now that I look at the photo, I’m not exactly sure why.  He doesn’t really look like a Western character; more like someone in a faux Western.

My beef with this model was the way they shaded his suit.  Instead of actually drawing pinstripes on it, they just applied an effect with photoshop (or whatever photo editing software they use) and gave perfect stripes that run from top to bottom.  It’s stylized, but not realistic, and basically impossible to duplicate.  Heck, painting pinstripes on models of table-top quality is quite difficult.

To get the effect, I tried to create a stencil using a dremel and a “top loader” (a piece of sturdy plastic designed to protect baseball cards), but it was hard to get the distance right and to get the stripes close enough, so I just gave up and did a quick free-hand.

Now, I’m down to twelve characters left.  At this point, I think I’m ready to set a date: I will have the rest of these painted up (And dipped) by the end of the month… Of course, I put these blog posts out at different speeds than I actually paint, and have a little buffer, but that gives me 18 days to paint the next 24 figures–plus I still have to do the dogs and the assistants.  That seems a little aggressive to me, but it should be doable…