Monday 19 December 2011

Let the Zombie Horde Begin - Part 2 Basing begins.

Well I have discovered a couple of things over the last few days.. firstly that you need a decent sized pair of clippers/side cutters to trim off white metal tabs from over a hundred 28mm white metal models, and secondly is milliput goes quite a long way.

I had four tubes of milli put sitting in my painting table draws and eagerly dug them out to get to grips with my planned basing of zombies. But it had all gone hard! Rock hard! I picked most of it up at our clubs Gauntlet Show some years back for £1 each and had used up some on buildings, but even the unopened pack had gone hard. Apparently, keeping it in the freezer, prevents it curing for longer. Same with green stuff.


So it was off to buy a shiny new pack. Now one tip for mixing milli put. Don't just cut off two same sized blobs, push them together and begin trying to mix them together. Its quite hard work and takes a while. A quicker method, is too, cut out your two blobs. Roll each out into a sausage as thin as you can get of same length. Then twist together. Then fold in half and twist together and then repeat. And the just mix by twisting and squeezing. Soon you have a pliable, mono colour blob ready to work with. Also discovered you can use water to smooth it.

Anyhow I spent a couple of hours over two nights, basing up my Victory Force Miniatures' Zombies.


My Victory Force Miniatures 28mm Zombies mounted onto two pence pieces.

You can see most of horde here. I simply rolled out a small roughly 3mm wide piece of milliput and laid across the "tails" side of the two pence coil, as the three feathers decoration provides more texture for the figure to stick too. And I like our Monarchy. :)

Having pushed the milliput down a little with my thumb, I think stuck the miniature into the blob of milliput. Having cut down the slotta tabs, they stood up fairly well. A couple of the miniatures with more animated poses, where they lean forward, had to be propped against some vallejo model paint bottles. Which are just perfect. On some of the models I tried smoothing the edges of the milliput to try and avoid a ridge, when I next apply some epoxy resin and then the basetex texture paint to them. But I was worried about the milliput curing and so just gave up, as the epoxy should help.


The milliput sausages, with figures pushed in. Next step will be the epoxy glue.


So that's it for now. Next step is to leave for a while and let them cure. Then it will be out with the epoxy, just as an insurance policy, as I know the milliput is pretty strong, but I a little blob of two part, across the tab will make me feel better.

My reasoning, is, that unlike many games, with zombies, you tend to pick them up, or place them on the sides, and put on and take off the table, a lot during a game. Far more than you would with say, a WW2 figure. So I want to make these pretty robust.

The next steps coming up are; 1) Epoxy, 2) Basetex paint on the base, 3) Undercoating. I also have a few zombie dogs to glue down to add to this lot. :)

Check back for more progress on the horde shortly!




4 comments:

Luckyjoe said...

Wow! That's a serious horde. Any chance of using larger pics for your follow-on shots? I'm especially interested in your method for securing them to the bases.

Goose on the loose said...

Joe cheers. If you click on the photos they should open up to a much larger size. If blogger is working correctly.

I have however added a close up shot of some of the milliput. Hopefully that will show you how I have done it. Its pretty simple really.

I will be adding some epoxy glue, over the tabs and milliput as security, though the milliput does seem pretty firm on its own. I just know these figures are going to get a lot, of handling.

Luckyjoe said...

@Goose: Thanks very much for the close-up. Very kind of you to post it. I couldn't see too well this morning. The latest pic is very helpful. I'm thinking of getting some VFM minis during the sale and rebasing.

Goose on the loose said...

Your welcome Joe.
If you have not seen my review on the VFM figurues, its a few entries down the list. They are nice figures. The detailing is ok. They aren't by any means, studio models, but they are cheap, and great for the price in my opinion.