The Inspiration
This piece is for round three of Iron Painter season 8. The theme is “Only Three Colors”. I chose to use black, white and red for my colors.
Google Images is a wonderful tool to use for references. A friend of mine suggested “black+white+red” for keywords and I saw many wonderful images for inspiration.
The inspiration for this piece came from various movies: Fido, Silent Hill, Sin City and Schindler’s List. Both Sin City and Schindler’s List are film noir using accent of red as a symbol for variety of things. As for Silent Hill, I adopted the scene with undead nurses and of course the gory rooms in Brookhaven hospital. The zombies came from Fido – the idea of the nurse having a pet zombie and feeding him with her victims is just way too fun to pass.
The Materials
This is my second vignette with a backdrop to mimic the room in Silent Hill. Using different types of styrene: the drywall plaster textured sheet for the wall and tile textured sheet for the floor.
For the accessories, I picked up some doors, windows, a balsa wood strip and a sink from H0 scale train modeling pieces.
As for the figures: I used Sister of Mercy from Freebooter Miniatures (now you understand why I clicked with the undead nurse from Silent Hill), zombie pieces from Rackham, and a casualty piece from Games Workshop. I didn’t use the original long ponytail that came with Sister of Mercy. Instead, I sculpted a ballerina bun and a nurse hat to make her look more like the Red Cross nurse in Silent Hill.
The Creation Process
For this one I did not start with sketches. I have a vivid visual of how the nurse will be standing close to the dead body, looking down at him and the zombies approaching his meal from another corner.
The stage will be something similar to the scene from Silent Hill, so I immediately started cutting the plastic sheets to create the “room”. The window sprue then glued to the wall and covered with broken pieces of balsa wood. After the room is done, I glued the dead guy on the “floor”. This casualty piece came from Warhammer Fantasy, so I covered his leg to make it look like he’s wearing a pair of slacks or jeans.
The tradition of dry-fitting/staging continues – with poster tacky, I played around with the characters and accessory (the sink) to find the best composition. This is where I took my time to think about the storyline. The sink, the nurse and the dead man are pretty straightforward. But the zombies need to be position so that they are part of the story. Remember the movie Fido? Yeah so the nurse just freshly killed the poor man with deadly chemical injection and now the zombie is ready for dinner. Got it? 🙂
Once I’m happy with placements, I drilled holes onto the “floor” so all the miniatures can be pinned. Now onto painting…This is a dark film noir style vignette and most of the area will be dark grey and black, so I primed it black. Then with an airbrush, I quickly and lightly covered some area with various level of dark grey and light grey just to create a light source that will guide my painting of the characters.
With that guide, I painted each miniatures separately with the focus set on the nurse being the lightest, followed by the zombies and the dead guy.
Once I am done with the miniatures, I continue developing the dark and gory ambience using red and black to create dry blood stains on the wall, the sink and the floor with various techniques: dry brushing, stippling, splattering and washing. After I was happy with the ambience, I glued the miniatures and the sink and added more blood as I saw appropriate. Here is the finished piece:
