Some More Zulu Wars Brits

Haven't painted any of my ACTA Zulu Wars minis in a while, so I thought I'd change that.
I like this batch better than the last; it's always good to see clear marks of progress in your technique.
I really like these figures; crisp and clean details and lively poses. My one complaint, which I may have mentioned before, is the flash. I did my best to trim these figures before painting, but sometimes those annoying little bits of flash don't show up until the minis are painted.

And here's the lot of 'em

A Call to Arms Zulu Wars British Infantry

To go with the ACTA Zulus I did a while back, I finally got around to painting up some of my ACTA Zulu Wars British infantry.
These are nice figs, but only after you cut off the immense amount of flash that they come with. The flash does not come in large flaps as with Airfix, but in narrow strips of mold line that run all around the figure. The flash is also in tight spaces, like between the poor guys' legs, and who wants to have surgery down there? The flash can be pretty difficult to remove.
However, once the flash is removed, these are very nice looking figures. The poses are not the most original, and another big detractor to the set is that there are only 8 poses, with 4 figures of each, for a grand (or not so grant) total of 32 figures. This is a smaller number than most other manufacturers put in their boxes. This is because A Call to Arms is a manufacturer that normally does 1/32 scale figures, and most of their 1/72 sets are scale-downs of their 1/32 sets. Thus, you don't get a whole lot of pose variety, or a whole lot of miniatures.
I would have preferred either the Esci set or the Hat set (of which there are a few, including a command set) but this was the only one that was easily available to me.
I painted these guys up using the well-known colors of the 24th Regiment of Foot. This regiment is the most famous of the Zulu Wars because it was the primary regiment at Rorke's Drift, and has been immortalized in the movie Zulu with Michael Caine.
The 24th's regimental color was green, and they wore this on their collar and cuffs. A picture of their uniform can be seen below.

This picture shows a corporal (right) and a private (left) of the 24th Regiment of Foot

My Zulus attacking the 24th Infantry at Rorke's Drift

Unfortunately, my "matte" varnish made these guys appear glossy, and I hate the toy soldier look.

This is my corporal. His white chevrons are barely visible in this picture.

Not a good time to be reloading, bud...

A Call to Arms Zulus

I painted these guys up a while ago. I got both the A Call to Arms 1/72 sets - the Zulus and British Infantry. I have yet to paint up the Brits, but I'm thinking I'll do a small-scale skirmish wargame (each set only contains 32 figures).
These Zulu minis are really well-detailed and beautifully sculpted, but they suffer from two sad flaws: their bases are tiny, and it's hard to stand them up (although this isn't a problem when you glue them to pennies) and their shields are as hard as #@$%! to glue on! Imagine fifteen minutes of your muscles cramping up as you try to hold this guys shield onto his arm, then you tentatively pull your hand away to see if it will stick, only to have it fall off and ruin the results of those agonizing 15 minutes! There's no workable peg-and-hole function to keep the shield on - it's all up to the glue to keep it attached.
I attempted drybrushing for the first time on these figures. The reason I don't normally drybrush figures is because A I don't even particularly like the way it looks and B you have to drybrush a separate color for each item of clothing/weapons/flesh, and  this is not worth the time.
For these figures, however, since they are all pretty much one uniform color (brown) I thought the drybrushing would be justified.

This guy is my favorite, so I thought he justified two pics.