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...

Shopping list for WWIII Wargame

Here are all the figures and vehicles I will need for my World War III wargame. I will update this page as I feel necessary, and as I cross off sets one by one. It may take me several months (or years) to collect all these figs.

RUSSIAN FEDERATION AND ALLIES:
Russian Federation
72003 Orion Modern Russian Federals 1995
556169 Italeri Para Russian Spetznaz
03190 Revell T90 Russian Battle Tank
72911 ICM Models BTR60PB Armored Personnel Carrier
72121 Ace Plastic Models 2S1 Gvozdika Tracked Armored Vehicle

Sword of Allah terrorist organization and other Middle Eastern armies
72002 Mars Mujahideen Warriors
31 Caesar Modern Urban Resisters
63 Caesar Modern Militia
72002 Orion Chechen Rebels 1995

German Army (Bundeswehr)
62 Caesar Modern German Army (Bundeswehr)

UNITED STATES COALITION:
United States
556168 Italeri Modern US Soldiers
30 Caesar Modern US Army
7276 Trumpeter US M1A1 Abrams MBT
7255 Trumpeter Stryker ICV Light Armored Vehicle]
7245 Dragon Models HMMWV M1025 ASK w/LRAS3 & w/Loudspeaker (2 models)

Israel
57 Caesar Modern Israeli Defense Force
72040 Orion Modern Israel Army Set #2
7103 Trumpeter Merkava Mk III Main Battle Tank

Britain
60 Caesar Modern British Army
001 Caesar British SAS
07215 Trumpeter British Challenger II Main Battle Tank Iraq
7102 Trumpeter British Warrior Tracked MCV

Zvezda Greek Infantry (5)

This is my second batch of Greeks. I'll get around to posting the first batch sometime.
The reason I do such small batches (of five figures) of these Greeks is because each one's different - they don't all have the same uniform. This necessitates a greater amount of time spent on each one, instead of going through them factory-style.
I'm painting the entire army in red colors - there is red somewhere on every figure. This is just in case I end up getting a second set of these Zvezda Greek Infantry to make a Peloponnesian Wars-style wargame - Greek vs. Greek. Then the only way to tell them apart would be color difference, so I would paint the other army in blue colors.

This batch has only 1 psiloi figure - the guy with the javelins. Psiloi were Greek light infantry.

I really like the white-on-black effect on this shield.

This is my favorite guy.

First two squads of Revell British Paratroopers (Falklands)

I painted these guys up in two batches. The first batch I painted earlier this year, the second more recently. So far there's two squads of riflemen with a radio operator and two heavy weapons stands.
I don't have anything specifically in mind for these dudes; maybe sometime in the indeterminate future I will try to make some Argies through headswapping and other methods, as I have seen some other bloggers do (here and here). The world of 1/72 scale gaming has a sad lack of Falklands-era Argentinian forces, despite there being two good Falklands-era British forces sets - the A Call to Arms British Infantry of the 1970s and the Matchbox NATO Paratroopers. The Revell British Paratroopers I painted up are just a reissue of this set under the false label of 1/76 scale.

My entire army so far - two squads with heavy weapons teams in support

Note the face paint.

How to paint camo

I thought this subject is important enough to merit its own post, so here it is. I do not claim to have the own workable method for painting camo, but it's worked for me and I like it.

Do your research into the type of camo you are trying to paint. Look at various examples of the camo. Camopedia is invaluable for this. See if you can determine which color is most prevalent - the base color. Paint your uniform in this color. Exactly which color is the background color is debatable. Use your own discretion.

Most camo patterns have at least three different colors in them. After doing the base color, find the next most prevalent color and paint this color on top. Look closely at your reference pictures to see what the pattern is. Is it striped? Horizontally or vertically? Is it spotted? What shapes are the spots? Is it blotched? Are the blotches square, circular, or irregularly shaped? For example, below are three US military camouflage patterns. Left is the "chocolate chip" desert camo pattern, worn in the Gulf War. Note that the background color is buff, with large blotches in two shades of tan/light brown. It is spotted with black and white leopard spots.
Center is the ERDL woodland camo pattern, worn in Grenada and other conflicts. I would use dark green for the background color, followed by irregular, branched blotches of brown, then light green, then thinner branches of black.
Right is the ACU pattern, currently in service today. The pixels in this camo are very small, and tricky to paint. The backround color is dark green, followed by tons of little pixelated dots of gray-green and buff. Alternately, you could do the background color buff, and follow it with the two other colors.
Painting camo is a lot simpler than it might look. The trick is to do it in layers, and cover up some of the previous layers to create an irregular pattern.

Airfix British 8th Army

I just had a few of these guys lying around, and decided to use them as practice models for a new technique: washing with varnish. Before, I used a water wash with a little black paint to create shadows, but then I had the idea to use varnish for my base. This works better because the varnish is thicker, and helps the paint to pool in crevices, creating better shadows.
However, I overdid the black in this wash, and the shadows are a bit to dark and heavy. Also, I forgot to prime this figures, and ended up putting no less than five coats of paint on this figures, obscuring some of the details.
This was something of a botched job, but it served my purpose: I now know to use varnish in the place of water for my shadow wash, and I am very pleased with the results.
Despite the chronological order of these posts, I painted these guys before my Orion and Italeri Russians, and so the Russians benefited from my experience with these poor 8th Army guys.

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.

World War III Wargame

Hey, everybody! This is my first post, and I hope you enjoy the site.
I recently started work on a World War III type wargame. The armies involved will be Russians, Iraq/Iranians, Syrians, Chinese, and other such countries on the one side, and a coalition of US, UK, Western European, and Israeli forces on the other side. The game will take place at around 1995.
I have to admit that I received my inspiration from this (rather cliched) idea from Steven at Sound Officers Call. I really liked his Orion and Esci/Italeri Russian minis, so I decided to buy both sets and start painting up my own post-Cold War Russian army.
The sets together add up to 96 figures, but about 12 of these are useless poses (there's even a guy peeing, though what Orion was thinking when they put this mini in the set is beyond me). I'm going to divide these guys into several branches: there'll be the VDV - Russian airborne - in blue berets and insignia; the Naval Infantry (marines) in black berets and insignia; the regular army troops (no special insignia); and the Spetsnaz, in special ops "birch tree" camo. I'll post painting guides for these various branches later on, just in case anyone's interested.
For this wargame, I am using the Counterattack rules by New Century Wargames (downloaded from freewargamesrules - a highly recommended site). I modified the rules slightly, and created new army rules for the Russian army.
I have no deadline for this wargame, and it's possible I'll never even finish it, but I'm just enjoying the process of painting up the figures.

Here are my first attempts:
This is my first squad of Naval Infantry (Marines). In my modified Counterattack rules, a rifle squad is made up of between 4 and 7 figures, including 1 officer and up to 2 machine guns and 1 heavy weapon, such as an RPG. This particular squad consists of 5 riflemen (armed with some version of the AK-74) and 1 officer, front, holding a pistol.

Here's my second addition to the army - a squad of regular army snipers. They are equipped with Dragunov SVD sniper rifles. 

I intend to pick up some Americans and Israelis once I have finished this Russian army, and then I'll get some armor: T-72s, Abrams tanks, and whatnot. Its a work in progress.