Tutorial: Speed painting 20 Mantic Zombies

I consider myself a pretty decent painter, but I don't paint stuff fast and I try all the time to speed up my painting using different techniques and one that is working pretty good for me is the Army Painter technique. So how do we need to paint these Zombies when using this technique? First of all the models, which can be from pretty much any company but the ones I have here is from Mantic Games who makes nice miniatures for a really good price. I assembled all of them which didn't take long, generally Mantic's stuff is easy to put together. Then you need some colours, a colour primer spray and Army Painters Quickshade Dark Tone.

First of all after assembling I sprayed all of them with Army Painters Colour Primer called Necrotic Flesh (can't find it any more so they have maybe stopped to produce it or something). Some of the minis stayed with this colour and some of them I washed with GW's washes like Thraka Green, Asurmen Blue, Ogryn Flesh and Baal Red. Just to get some more variate in the unit. Next step is to paint the blood, I did this with a 40/60 mix of Blood Red and Red Gore. And I painted this on all the exposed tissue, organs etc. It doesn't matter if the blood goes on places you didn't wanted because it will just look more real and the zombie will look more gory. I also painted this mix on the hands on most of them and around the mouth to represent that they recently eaten on an unlucky foe.

After this I painted the exposed bone areas (like the rib cages and knees on some of the models) with a mix of Dheneb Stone and Bleached Bone. I also painted the cloth they are wearing in browns, greys and whites using, Calthan Brown, Adeptus Battle Grey and Dheneb Stone. I also painted the hair in these colours. And finally I highlighted the bones with skull white and a mix of 60/40 mix of Blood red and Skull white as an highlight to the intestines and the muscle fibres. Then I painted the eyes and teeth with Skull White. Now on to the dipping part.

Here they are dipped in Quick Shade Dark Tone and when they have dried 24 hours I sprayed them with AP's Anti Shine Matt Varnish. Be careful with this though and don't spray to much, because otherwise you can destroy the result like I did here.

After this is was just the basing to be done, took a lot of time for me though and can be shortened quite a lot if you don't work with all the materials I used. I used, GW sand, painted it with a mix oif Vermin brown and Tausept Ochre which I then Highlighted with the same mix but with quite a lot of added Skull white. I then washed the whole bases with Devlan Mud and when dried added AP's Brown Battleground and Ash Grey flock. Then I added Green Static Grass and Citadels Dead Grass and on top of this some of the Mordheim Turfs and Middenland Tufts from Citadel. All in all this process with all twenty of them took maybe eight hours to get done, and three or maybe even four of them was the basing process. Really happy with the result though and I know there's some of you you which can make this faster but that's as fast I can get them done with this quality which is fine for me. Hope you like this tutorial and go and paint some Zombies, If you're an VC player you will need them ;)