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TTcombat, who seem to run their kickstarters by the name Troll Trader these days, have to date run three massively successful kickstarters. They make cheap resin minis obviously intended for Warhammer Fantasy Battle and/or Age of Sigmar use, with rank and file armies as their main focus. Their first one features halflings and undead halflings, their second was the Desert of the Dead, with egyptian-styled elves, halflings and undead as the main attractions.

The Desert of the Dead was fulfilled this spring, and I got the “RPG pledge” which included an assortment of a unit each of most of the different types of minis offered in the KS.

Amongst all the minis, there was a group of twenty zombie slaves. Naturally, these are the first on the painting table.

There are nine different Zombie Slaves sculpts:

The Necromancer Slave Driver was an add-on that would have been included if I had bought one of the larger undead army deals.
As a horde of Zombie Slaves needs a slave driver, I added him.

His staff was broken and I used a length of paperclip to fix it. I should have thickened it to match the original pole, but did not bother. It’s fine like this, it makes the ankh stand out even more.

I put these on 25mm 3D printed bases.

The painting on the Zombie Slaves is simple, I did the skin tones in three or four different pale colours and used a couple of the skin contrast paints on top. This turned out pretty terrible and far too shiny, so I drybrushed the lot of them lightly with some pale green fleshtone, and used some strong tone quickshade here and there on some of them. Much better. Then I did all the cloth in a pale beige and an off white, the metal in dark bronze with nihilakh oxide, details here and there in other colours I randomly had on my palette. Weapon hafts and mouths in dark reddish purple, yellow sand teeth. Blue in blue eyes. Bases and done.


At any rate, some observations on the TTcombat resins:
1. There is a good variety within each unit type. For example, the twenty Zombies features nine (!) different sculpts. I suspect there actually should have been ten different sculpts but then maybe they made a picking errror, or one of the sculpts did not pass QC after casting and had to be replaced with one of the others, or something.

2. The resin has some serious greasy feel to it. I expect that this is residue mould release agent, silicone or some sort of grease that I am finding really difficult to remove.
I have tried scrubbing with dishwashing detergent without luck. I have tried Iso alcohol, no dice. Maybe I am not doing it right.
When I prime the minis, the vallejo airbrush primer I use does not really want to adhere. The result is a patchy undercoat, with bare spots here and there, especially in crevises and deep detail. Usually a second coat of primer does the trick, but still. Not good. I need to prime thicker than I like just to get the paint to stick.
The first Halflings & fantasy friends kickstarter resins had the same greasiness.

3. The resin is both slightly flexible and durable. I have had very few problems with broken parts, and have dropped a few onto the floor with no ill effects. These have been small, single piece castings though.

Painted so far this year:   (Miniatures:  131 / 365 goal // scenery and terrain: 6) oh dear, I am lagging seriously behind, it’s the 195th day of the year… that is 64 more minis needed just to catch up…looks like I might have to get around to painting those night goblins soon…

January: 38 // 5
February: 20
March: 11 / 1
April: 8
May: 13
June: 20
July: 21