Army of the Month: Mike Adkins

Greetings, and welcome to another Army of the Month segment, the article series where Dash28 highlights and interviews one community member and their army. This month we are featuring the behind the scenes mastermind of Dash28, our tech guru, and the all around engine behind Dash28, the one, the only, Mike Adkins!

Mike revealed this stunning army at Mountaineer GT, where I was a paint judge, and had the pleasure to spend about two hours gushing over the various details of the army. While planning this army, Mike knew he wanted to switch things up from the abyssals, and Undead had been on his short list of armies to try for a while.

He was excited by how much fiction and lore surrounded the Undead, it meant that the stories he wanted to tell would be well known; everyone has a concept of zombies, vampires, and skeletons in their minds, so instead he could run with the story behind his army.

In addition, he was excited to try to paint something with a darker palette; and that played very different from the quick, alpha strike style of his flying heavy Abyssal list. With this decided, Mike could begin planning how he wanted to approach this army.

Planning

Undead is a pretty common army, and Mike commented that the default theme seems to have the army set in a graveyard. Its a no brainer (ha Zombie pun) as the Mantic kit even comes with tombstones! However, people expect it, and Mike wanted to try something different. As with most painted armies, Mike spent months planning and agonizing over details, because he even began putting paint brush to model.

Mike formed the idea that he wanted to show what an undead army looked like a couple days down the road. He wanted to show what happens after they have dug out of the ground, once they have engaged in some action. The idea was to show them attacking a town.

This concept formed his starting point, it hit all the goals he has for an army project, namely that an army must be Unique, Dynamic, and Narrative.

Unique, because he wanted his army to look different and stand out, dynamic because then there is stuff happening, and finally Narrative, because it will tell a story, view-able thru the models. For each army project, Mike tried to pick a different aspect of the hobby to improve on, be it an painting technique, basing, ect. For the Undead, Mike wanted to embrace multibasing completely.

Viewing this army as a chance to push his multibasing and display, Mike actually started with his display board, building and planning a board to show case the story of a town under attack. His hope, was that starting in this way would make the army feel like one big cohesive diorama.

Mike still wanted a “hook” to give his army extra details, and pull people in. For this, he sought to give a deeper, and darker story to his army, by drawing inspiration from Disney’s Fantasia “Night on Bald Mountain.” In this short, a demon unfurls his wings atop a mountain that is overlooking a sleepy town, and it raises an army.

For Mike’s army, named “In the Shadow of Death,” a demonic figure, representing an angel of death, or a similar powerful figure, appears on a hill overlooking the city. Wherever the shadow is, things die, and the Undead army pulls itself up from the devastation, and turns on the remaining occupants of the town!

Model Choice

As with any army, model choice and style plays a heavy role in the theme Mike created. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, he has some post project wisdom to drop on any interested hobbyists.

Mike used Mantic’s Soul Reavers on Foot Models, and while he did an excellent job using Nonmetallic Metal techniques on them, he was not very pleased with the models. He said they have a LOT of flash, and needed a lot of clean up. The models themselves are very plain looking, and have very little movement or character in them. There is only one model without a helmet, and even that face is not very good. This is particularly a shame, as these are the elite core of Mike’s list, and should form a focal point!

For the ever popular Mounted Soul Reaver regiment, Mike used a unit of vampire cavalry from Gamezone. He has always been a fan of their aesthetic, and was willing to deal with the metal sculpts to get the models in his army. The unit has a lot of movement, with each model looking like it is running full speed. With that dynamic movement, however, comes some fragility, as the models are touching the ground only on one point each, and they had quite a few gaps. Mike says they were a pain in the neck, but totally worth it.

Mike, like many Undead generals under Clash ’19, makes good use of Lady Ilona’s formation. For his broken… er… inspiring Vampiress, he used a raging heroes Dark Elf model, adding a corpse to the ground so her holding a heart made sense.

Lady Ilona was consistently Mike’s MVP in the army. He said she projects so much threat. He usually takes a necromancer to teleport her, and having a beast like Ilona behind you turn one is a huge psychological threat. He has had games where she hasn’t killed anything, but caused units in a elite armies to move out of position, or hesitate in vital moments, making her impact in the game huge.

He is fully expecting her to get nerfed come third, but for the time, he is happy to use her to full effect!

Finally, Mike’s revenants in all their bony glory are worth talking about. Heavily armored skeletons are a dime a dozen in fantasy games, and there are a lot of great choices. Mike used Mierce, because he loves the line, and wanted at least one Mierce unit in the army. He liked that these skeletons looked beefier then regular skeletons.

Some details I noted, Mike made great use of weathering pigments from Secret Weapon miniatures to give an amazing rust effect, which helps the unit pop. The strong use of basing materials, lanterns, and uniforms give splashes of color, making the unit look even more interesting and dynamic. This is one of my personal favorite pieces in Mike’s army, it takes what often is a mundane unit, and makes it awe inspiring!

Favorite Unit

Mike says that there are two units tied for his favorite. First, there is of course the demon general himself. This is perhaps unsurprising as it is such a large and impressive piece.

Other then the big scary demon though, Mike’s favorite unit may come as a bit of a surprise to some people. It is his legion of zombies, he actually picked this unit size, not because he thought it was the best choice, but because he was really excited to see what he could do with a legion sized base.

For his zombies, he used Mantic’s zombie models, which he is a big fan of. He said the kit was awesome, they are very undead looking, and have a lot of flexibility as a kit. He particularly loved the reaching hands and awkward poses, that evokes the jerky movement of zombies. These reaching hands are put to good use by Mike, who created a dynamic, and amazing story over every inch of this unit.

Mike was excited to for the opportunity to use the Gamesworkshop corpse cart in this unit, but tying it back to his background of the army, they haven’t collected a full cart, they are still grabbing lumber to assemble it, and corpse to fill it up. This helps inject some great story to the unit, and lend itself to dynamic movement.

Mike stumbled upon the natural placement and shambling appearance of the zombies in a very unique way. While painting, he would move a zombie from his unpainted desk drawer, to his painted desk drawer. As he painted, he kept opening one drawer, then the other, to transfer the zombies from side to side.

The vibrations of this desk movement caused the painted zombies to shuffle and cluster together, until enough were painted, some grouped together in a loose cluster, another may have wandered off to the side alone, and others formed their own clusters. In an odd turn of fate, the accidental movement caused by the desk vibrations created what Mike thought zombies should look like on a unit base. Running with this inspiration, he recreated their rough composition on the base!

This leads us to Mike’s tip for aspiring hobbyists, leave yourself open to bolts of inspiration. If you become too focused on a project flowing a specific way, you cut yourself off from some of the moments that can take a project to new heights of greatness.

Zombie Skin

While I could spend all day drooling over the details of this army, a final detail Mike discussed, that I found really interesting, was the way he did the zombies skin, which also was how he did the demon!

For the zombie flesh, he used the citadel flesh colors for the underwater elves. He liked that is was pale and had a very different look. After a base coat with, he then took about 5 different washes, and painted them onto the models, like they were watercolors. He didn’t let them dry, instead blending the colors together, while they were wet. He may start with green on head and shoulders, and brown on the chest and legs, ect. pulling it so that where the colors met, and blended them together.

Then he would use crimson washes to give red bruises and on the exposed musculature. Doing all this, while the washes were wet, gave the skin a mottled looking finish. He then let the skin dry and did a base coat and some highlights. The effect gave the rotted flesh a varied and inconsistent look. He said overall the effect was pretty easy, and a lot of fun to do. The underlying technique for the plague angel was the same, hence why Mike considers painting it similar to a giant zombie!

I want to give a big thanks to Mike, for taking the time to share all these details of his Undead army. I hope readers enjoyed it as much as I did! As always, please comment on the article and tell us what you think. If you know someone you think should be features on here, comment and tell us and hopefully we can work something out.