Dead flesh!!

Zombies tend to get painted one of three colours, blue, green or some kind of  fleshy colour. Digging out some fantasy figures yesterday reminded me how I was always went for the blue flesh with my zombies. That wasn't a surprise as such,  Romero's Dawn of the Dead with its blue faced Z's was burnt in to my conciousness in the days of  video nasty hysteria. Seeing those old blue skinned figures did make me realise just how green my zombies had gotten of late. Thing is there was never a concious decision to go green, it just happened!

Here are some old blue skinned fantasy zombies. I don't reckon there's a logical reason for flesh to turn such a blue colour but it always looks suitably pale and undead... maybe the blue is something to do with the necromantic magic used to create them.

I remember giving the flesh on some of these figures an orange glaze, which being the colour opposite to blue, greyed the flesh a little.

Some old citadels... I think one of these was from the AD&D range.

The paint job of those figures must be around 10 years old, if not more. I think these were one of the first groups of figures were I stopped using slotta bases and went back to how I based pre-slotta

Anyway as I mentioned earlier all these blue zombies made me realise how green my Z's had gotten recently.... so last night I took a couple of part painted boss zombies I had on the work bench and slapped on some blue toned flesh to see how they compared with my recent green ones!

As odd as this may sound this was the first time I'd painted under artificial light for maybe 15.... 20 years...

Anyway looking at them this morning I'm liking the way these turned out. Sort of look a bit more realistic which in turn makes them more creepy maybe. Actually they ended up being not so blue in the end... certainly not as blue as the old fantasy figs.

On reflection the females Z's breasts look a bit odd, some kind of extreme tan line effect :) but overall a nice dead colour on both of them. The colours used were a dusty peach ( this was an Anita's brand fleshy colour for no other reason than it was on the desk!) and vallejo ultramarine blue. So the shading was done with these two colours alone. Then I used black, green and blue ink to apply really thin glazes to give the skin a mottled look, and dirty it up a bit also.

So here's the taste test so to speak! Last nights' Z's next to some recent greeny ones.

The pic reminds me to mention the little conversion work... adding hair to the male and more lumpy bits to the female here and there!!

Well what's left to say? Here's a group shot of the zombies. Thanks for reading!!!