My players finally arrived at the Mere of the Dead Men, a cold saltwater marsh. The swamp is the site of an old kingdom which was overrun by an orc horde, and many souls still linger in this place. Naturally, we were in need of undead miniatures!

Although I have a couple of skeletons, zombies, a ghost and a banshee, you can never have too many undead miniatures for a game of Dungeons & Dragons. When I recently went through all my prepainted D&D miniatures, there also were a couple of undead minis I wanted to repaint. I prepared an encounter where my players had to face a group of wights and a dozen zombies alongside the sunken roads within the swamp. So for this battle, I decided to speed-paint some wights and a zombie.

This art from D&D 4E shows types of different undead humanoids, the wight is the third one from the left. Wights are evil undead who once were mortals driven by dark desire and great vanity (5E MM). Without all the fluff, they’re basically just stronger zombis with a life drain attack (CR3).

The miniatures I used were 3 x Terror Wights from the D&D Wardrums Set and also a 1 x Zombie from the D&D Giants of Legend Set.

Basing and Priming

First, I cleaned the figures with water and soap and then glued some sand and small pebbles on the base. Then, the minis were airbrushed with black primer and then dusted with withe primer to achieve basic shading.

Painting

This was a speed-paint and the whole process took about two or three hours for all four minis altogether. For the skin, I mixed a rotten flesh color based on Vallejo Game Color Dead Flesh and a little Blue. The hair was done in black, also with a hint of blue. The clothes were done in stronger colors, so the wights would be easy to recognize on the gaming table. They got red, blue and brown garments. For the zombie I chose a brown robe.

The details were also done pretty quick: The black hair was drybrushed with a light grey and the minis were washed with a thin brown wash. After they were dry enough, I decorated the bases with little tufts of yellow-green grass.

Here is the final version!

And that’s really all there is about to say about these models. They were fun to paint, and I would say they didn’t turn out too bad. But also, they were not very detailed or really interesting figures to begin with. Good enough as cannon fodder! 😉