The Ungrateful Dead

An unsuspecting group of urban explorers are stalked by the Ungrateful Dead...

I'm a terrible one for buying stuff off of eBay or a magazine for the sake of a sprue that's stuck to the front cover, all because I think that the bits "might come in useful" one day. And having been doing this for around thirty years now, my collection is getting to be quite large and diverse, as you can well imagine.

Needless to say, when the Age of Sigmar: Mortal Realms piecework appeared on the shelves of newsagents everywhere, I was more than eager to get my hands on a copy. The 40K one had been an insane steal for the price of the first issue, with miniatures, paints and a brush for a fraction of the cost of the same stuff from a GW store.

Image borrowed under Fair Usage rules

And while there were less of the paints and brushes in the ROS version, there were a LOT of really great minis up for grabs, including some of the best Stormcast Eternals for conversion purposes and a large number of very interesting undead that I learned were called Chainrasps.

When I finally got my copy, I loved the detail of the Chainrasps, but I thought it was a shame they basically lacked bodies below the level of their arms. I began to wonder if I could do something about that, and thinking of the chaos rabble that I'd been making with WWII Bolt Action sprues given away with issues of Wargames Illustrated.

A tail of two halves...

I found some Whermacht troops that were going spare and then cut the torsos away from the legs before setting about sizing them up as lower-halves for the Chainrasps. I found that I didn't have to cut away too much of their shrouds to make this work, pinning them together and filling the gap with Milliput.

Next came sculpting over the joins with greenstuff and detailing the bases. I chose to use the origianl bases that came with the Bolt Action Germans, but also to build up the mass with lumps of Milliput, adding broken gravestones and spikey-looking bits of metal.

I had no clear plan of what the feel of the conversions should be, but as I've always loved the crazy aesthetic of the Zombie Army games, I started to see them as phantoms that stalked a WWII battlefield in search of living souls upon whom to take out their eternal torment as damned spirits trapped between worlds.

This was why I tried to model them as looking like they were clambering over uneven, crater-strewn terrain, howling and screaming at any potential victims they might see. I also snapped any blades that they held, trying to emphasize their ragged and broken nature.

I primed the models in black using a cheap rattle-can and then hit them with a white zenithal highlight before blocking in the metal parts with Vallejo silver. Then they received an all-over coat of Aethermatic Blue contrast paint for that essential ethereal look, followed by a wash with Drakenhoff Nightshade. When this was dry, I finished off the minis with a highlight of Vallejo Light Blue and then Ivory.

I painted the bases with a slate grey emulsion paint and then dry-brushed with Vallejo Neutral Grey and Ivory. The gravestones were painted Neutral Grey and then dry-brushed with Ivory too. The metal was blocked in with Citadel Leadbelcher, washed with Fuegan Orange and then edge-highlighted with Leadbelcher once again.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the way these turned out. I was aiming for the smooth kind of look you get on the GW examples of these minis, but the more gritty and dirty way the paint scheme worked out seems to fit better with the idea behind the minis themselves.

As always, let me know what you think, either on here or via social media.

And hopefully I'll be back before too long to show off the mess I manage to make of these guys: