Last week my new family board game Zombicide arrived with 76 zombies. And a few heroes. I wanted to paint them quickly. Just grey is …. just grey.

I wanted an EVIL colour scheme

I checked the web. I started with the zombie horde. Villains/supervillains dress in purple, green and orange.

I copied this scheme. Manic evil. Great.
Many zombies have a greenish skin. Combined with purple and  a touch of orange you have the perfect dark villainous zombie horde.

So I carelessly and quite randomly splashed green, purple, orange and a few variants on the miniatures, quick-quick-10 per hour, not too neatly. They’re dead already! and, btw, will be covered in blood and dark varnish, so who cares about precise detail? I painted all bases black to accentuate the PURE EVIL! A grey highlight finished the pre-Army Painter job.

For the Abomination, Zombicide’s arch-boss, I blatantly copied the Joker’s colour scheme.

The H.E.R.O. colours

With the zombies painted as cartoon villains, a superhero colour scheme for the Survivors would be a logical choice. Superheroes wear primary colours. Red/Blue is dominant, Red/Yellow is vibrant, and sometimes blue/yellow is chosen, check Batman or the original blue-yellow X-Men. Blue/Yellow is police-ish. Some heroes are yellow/green (Green Lantern) or red/yellow with a green subcolour (Robin)
Notice that heroes are most often dressed in the primary colours red, blue and yellow, and the villains in the secondary colours purple, green and orange. Thus you have a primary/secondary colour contrast. Superheroes more often have white accents (Wonder Woman, Thor, Captain America) while supervillains wear black more often. I primed the girls red, the office worker and the police-officer blue and the old hipster Ned and the boy yellow-brown.

Here they are. Ned on the left is painted as the Green Lantern, the girls were inspired by Spider(wo)man and Wonderwoman, the police officer is painted as in grey/black/blue and yellow like the Batman, the office worker has the Superman colour scheme, and the boy was painted as Robin.

The zombie giant in the left corner is the vintage Joker.
I could write a lot about speedpainting, but to make a long story short, I followed standard techniques. Dipped the monsters in black and the heroes in brown, to accentuate evil/good, and highlighted the heroes extra to make them stand out on the table. I covered the zombies in dark red blood that I highlighted with pure red for extra drama.

I finished the project within a week, 4-5 evenings I suppose. Happy with the results. For newbies: just be confident, keep it simple and start dipping. Have no fear! Not for zombies, at least.

I played the game today with my 9 and 10 year old kids (I try to infect them with my miniature gamers disease) and it was instant fun. Very Scoobydoo! And So Much Better Than Catan!