Mammoth undertaking

I think I'm probably approaching the halfway point in my drive to create a small Undead skirmish force, using only parts and miniatures I've already got at home. (Most of which I've had lying around in boxes since I was a child in the 1980s.)

By today's standards, where people seem to paint up armies of several hundred miniatures in just a month or two of evenings, this project would appear quite modest (it's only somewhere between 30 and 50 miniatures in total), but for me it's already likely to be one of the largest, continuous efforts I've made in years.

And these next two additions are probably my favourite so far. I'm expecting them to form the centrepieces of the finished force.

They are based on the two Grenadier Masterpiece Editions shown below. Both of which are wonderful miniatures that my 13 year old self fooled himself into thinking he'd have any chance of doing justice.

When I dug these out of my past, they were badly glued together, covered in thick paint, and had multiple broken or missing parts. They were so horrendous, I couldn't even bring myself to document their condition with a photo. I think, all these years, somewhere at the back of my mind I had been aware that I owed them a duty of care. A nagging feeling that they deserved to be finished with a little more skill than mini-me offered them.*

So the first thing I did was drop them in a bath of acetone for about a week, then scrub them vigorously with an old toothbrush till most of the paint and glue had gone. Although this didn't make them pristine, I figured any lasting filth could be incorporated into the finished model to represent the accumulated dirt and disrepair of the Undead.

Then I glued them back together, added a few extra bits 'n' pieces (mainly off-cuts from the Plague Marines I chopped up at the end of last year), sculpted replacements (out of green stuff) for any vital parts that were missing, and scratched together a new plastic skeleton crew.

Hopefully, once I get a little paint on them, it'll all be worth it.


*Or perhaps by someone with the exact same skill levels, but much better tools. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether I'm better at painting miniatures, or whether it's just all the new brushes, paints and washes that create the illusion of this.