Zulu Ibuthu Three

 Just a quick post for pics of my latest Zulu unit. I actually completed it a couple of months ago but forgot to post about it. Presenting the inDlondlo:

Zulu Ibutho Two

After taking about 18 months or so to finish my first Zulu regiment, I cracked on with doing a second one right away. 

I've had a wet palette for a couple of years and not really used it. My style has pretty much set to using paint out of the bottle and slap it on thickly. One of the downsides is that I end up wasting a lot of paint drying on the palette. But for some reason, I decided to try out the wet palette again, but not to do mixing. Instead, I discovered that it helped thin out the paint to a consistency that helps me paint much quicker through better flow and waste less paint through drying. Wet palette veterans are probably laughing at me, but it's never too late to learn a new technique.

Anyway, here is the new ibutho, the isAngqu.

And a close up

Zulu Ibutho Complete

 I finally completed my first Zulu regiment, inDluyenge uMbonambi. It has been quite a long time, but I am happy with the result. 

I based them for The Men Who Would Be Kings, so there is 16 figures per unit. The bases are ones that I printed, with Leader printed on half of them. There is also a spot on the back of the base where players can put their leader values. I used magnets so that players can interchange the values.

Here are a couple of close ups:

Gone to Ground

 In The Men Who Would Be Kings, tribal infantry can, as an action, choose to go to ground as their action. So I needed a set of markers for this.

This gives warriors like Zulus some defense against bullets and artillery.

I bought a cheap makeup case to put my markers in. To make them fit, I printed a rack to hold these markers. They are a little squished to make all 8 fit.

1st Project With a 3D Printer

 So I got a 3D printer for Christmas. It's a Bambu Lab A1 Mini and it has been great. 

I've printed the obligatory Benchy (that's what it was doing above) and some accessories (printer poop basket, toolbox, and scraper). It's now time to put it to its true purpose: printing stuff for my miniatures.

I've had 300 15mm Zulus for a while and I've stagnated in painting them. I also recently (relatively) aquired The Men Who Would Be Kings rules. These rules use individual figures for casualties, so the obvious solution is to create movement trays for them, because why move 12-16 inividual figures when you can move just a couple of trays?

I've started with an artillery tray because it only have 4 figures on it. I have quite a few figure bases saved (courtesy of the Canadian government) and so I designed the stands to fit them. I should have enough to base all of my Zulus and British, but then I will have to look for alternatives for other periods.

 In TMWWBK, every unit has a leader, so I wanted to have a specific spot for him. I experimented with pausing printing and swapping from the grey filament to a white filament, and it worked reasonably well. The text a little smudgy, but it should look OK after I apply some flock and other terrain.

The leader also has a rating. But because the leader rating can vary from unit to unit, I didn't want to make it a permanent feature of the stand. Instead, I will be creating some labels and an area on the stand to put them. To keep the labels in place, I'm using mini magnets.

These pictures are showing my prototypes. I think I've got them pretty much dialed in to how I want them, so now I'll start cranking them out. I'll be  swapping out the grey filament for brown, and if I'm lucky I may not even need to prime the trays.

Any way, here's a more close up of the trays with some Zulus to show what the trays look like with figures in them. You can see the white letters aren't perfect, but they are definitely good enough.