Briiiines.

Sea zombies. Drowned dead? Brine zombies? Need a catchy name. They're supposed to fit alongside the brine mutants of course. I'm trying for a "Davy Jones, the necromancer from Innsmouth" vibe with all these briny fellows.

Not really happy with the colouring. I think that two or three shades per area is necessary to stop them looking flat, but two-tone shading is not my forte. What is this "uniform light source" you talk of? The boots are especially embarassing. Maybe I'll get the hang of it later on, or just come up with something better. I am fairly content with the fleshy areas. Just darkening the edges seems to work there, especially with the raw pink areas.

Modelwise, I didn't bother with swappable parts here. Instead they all have schticks. I suppose that I could mix them up with some barnacles, a little seaweed and decay on all of them, but I've a feeling that the effect wouldn't be as strong. I might come back and make another variation or two. Chains could be nice except that I've not come up with a good way to do them in this style. Maybe one with an anchor stuck through him?

By the way, stick-figure zombies are hard. I only really have the chest and head to display injuries on. The empty eye sockets were a good idea, but something that really requires colour to pull off. Tattered clothing is a nice short-hand, but all those ragged edges takes a lot of nodes. Ditto the seaweed and the barnacles. I did so many passes on these guys, trimming away excess nodes and trying to make the more simplified shapes look right. But there's only so far you can take barnacles before they stop looking like barnacles.

In a way it's easier to do sea zombies than the regular kind - I can cover sea zombies in "drowned" props that imply deadness without having to do tricksy injuries. My tentative experiments with vanilla zombies are, so far, unsatisfying. I'm thinking of giving them mouths as a visual cue. In an emergency I could always carry over the empty eyesockets look - though I intended that to be specific to the sea zombies. Ah well - that's a problem for the future.

Hmm, how many types of zombies can I do, anyway? Drowned is one. Traditional risen dead is another. Surgically reanimated, frankenstein style. Animated by some kind of parasite/fungus/disease (bloated, bits sticking out) is another. It'd be nice if I could manage to skip traditional zombies completely, but I have a gravedigger peep that I'm pretty happy with. Hmm. Anyway, I'd probably use a different base model for each variety, which should help avoid too much sameness.