In my last post about Seekers, I wound up alluding to the possibility of adding a splash of color to my models. I was intentionally vague because, at the time, I wasn’t sure what all I wanted to do to them. My friend had a vial of GW’s Technical Paint called “Nurgle’s Rot,” that I’d contemplated dabbling with. He offered to let me try it out, but I ultimately proved too impatient and I just went with straight blood effects.

I don’t use the GW technical paints for blood, instead using Tamiya’s Clear Red. You can see more on my earlier attempts at blood effects in my Dishonored Imperium Statues and my Building Posts. All that you really have to do is glob on the effect–then you can generally apply another coat of it mixed with black for a dried blood look.

Since these are board game models, I didn’t figure the models required that much detail, so I opted to skip the “dried blood” effect, and just went with the red/gory look.

My first inclination was just to do a little bit here and there on some of the models to make them stand out. After all, I just wanted to include the effect on the board, but didn’t want to put in the time to bloody them all up. After working through a few figures, it was clear to me that I had to work on every figure to make them truly horrific; however, I didn’t want to make them all the same.

The obvious (and really great looking) style was to paint blood hands and mouth, but with 280 zombies to paint up, I had to mix things up. So, I tried to make some bleed from the eyes, or any of the various open wounds they have. The runners that were clutching their chests all seemed to get massive coronaries, while models that looked as if they were stumbling often were the recipients of head wounds. Really, it was a matter of whatever looked good on the model, or whatever I was feeling at the time.

I also took the time to paint up all of their bases as well. As I discussed before, I went with gray for most of the models, and used black bases for the runners. I think that it’s distinct enough that it’s easy to pick them out, but not so obvious that it seem to detract from the overall board state.

In most cases, I think the blood really stands out well; though in some of the zombie types (namely the berserkers and also the seekers), it’s a little subtle for my likes–but I didn’t want to neglect them, or to overdo the effect just to make them stand out.

So now the question is how do I seal them? Do I just go out and buy a few cans of spray sealant and see if I can make another hole in the ozone? Or do I resort to the dreaded dip…?