Deutsch-Ostafrika: European Settlers

I'm getting ready for a colonial Africa game with axabrax next weekend, so I'm trying to get some of my WWI Africa purchases painted up that will look appropriate for this earlier period. As such, I've recently finished some European settlers:

These figure are Boers from Warlord's Anglo-Zulu War 1879 line, so are perfect for this earlier era.  There are four poses, with eight separate heads to allow for more variety.  Casting was very clean, with minimal mold lines and flash. The heads fit very well, and there were no unsightly gaps.

The figures are slightly smaller than African figures by other manufactures that I own:

L to R: Foundry, Copplestone, Warlord, Brigade

However, I don't think the height different is so significant that you will notice it when looking down at the table.

Though these figures are 30 years too early for when they will see most of their action, there are not many Europeans out there to choose from, and I highly doubt that simple people out in the colonies are going to be wearing the latest in European styles. 

Now we'll just have to wait and see how they perform on Saturday!

Heroclix Repaints

As I've stated earlier, I'm not a fan of the Heroclix figures.  A lot of the sculpting is merely mediocre, and the painting is terrible.  That being said, there are a lot of figures that my kids want that don't have something similar available in metal.  As such, I broke down and started looking on eBay for cheap Heroclix that seemed to have potential for conversion.  I ended up buying a bunch for $1-$3 from a vendor offering deep shipping discounts on multiple figures.

As expected, they looked terrible, but underneath the horrible painting, there were actually some pretty good sculpts for most of them.  The plastics they were made of seemed to vary between figures, with some being hard, and others soft.  Depending on the figure, they were cast with no bases, small bases around each foot, or a large crescent shaped based. Figure sized seemed to vary, but overall the majority weren't too different in size to my metal miniatures. All could be be popped off the Heroclix dial without too much effort using a blade . This I did, placing the figures on 30mm rimmed bases (unless the figure was too large) and added resin texture gel.  Based on what I'd read on LAF and other forums, I decided to forgo priming the figures and just start right on top of the existing paint job.

Currently, I have three figures completed:

Repainted Batman

The original Heroclix

The particular Batman figure runs large: He is 33cm foot to eye, putting him about half a head above the other standard size figures.  There are several other sculpts available, so perhaps one of them would be closer to the other figures.   That being said, this particular sculpt isn't too bad.  I opted to keep him in the more modern dark colors than the classic blue.

Repainted Darkseid

The original Heroclix

The original paint job on Darkseid actually wasn't too bad, just really flat looking. I think the 3-tone upgrade makes him pop much more. Darkseid is a large figure, running 42mm foot to eye.  Floating in the air, he would have been difficult to store in my current box, so I'll brought him back down to earth and put him on a 40mm base.

Repainted Abomination

The original Heroclix

Abomination is the last figure for this round of painting. The sculpting is good, but he was just a hunk of green plastic with two white dots for eyes and a smeared mouth.  Rather than keeping him bright green, I decided to give him more of an olive color, using Russian green as the base. I think this will make him stand out a bit more against the Hulk.

Overall, I have to say they are coming out better than I expected.