28mm Jungle Adventures: Jungle, Tikis, and Zombie Pygmies

Its been a while since we put up a post. Things have been busy here trying to get orders out before the Memorial Holiday plus starting to gear up to complete the Historicon deliveries. To add to the backlog Allison was called in to substitute for most of May. As a result its been a struggle to keep up.

These are some wonderful zombie pygmies from Conquest Miniatures. Ive done a few sets of these before in the past and they are still one of my favorites.

Next are some tikis from Recreational Conflict. These will make neat little additions to the terrain:

Here are the contents of one set. Each set has eight different tikis in it.

Finally we have some jungle tree bases from Architects of War. There are two of their sets here. Some have complained that they are pricey but I feel they are well worth their cost. Sure someone could buy all the individual pieces to make the sets themselves but they would have a lot of running around and hassle to go through to assemble the variety that comes in the kits. Plus they would still have to cut out and texture the bases. Considering with these you break them out of the packaging and go, the time it saves you is well worth it.

Here's some shots with the tikis, jungle, and pygmies all together with a few adventurers thrown in:

A Viking Ship and Some Normans

Another recent Cold War delivery was a 28mm Viking ship. The ship model is made by Old Glory. It comes with the ship, the mast, the oars, and the crew. I took some work-in-progress shots to help show that I painted the model in stages then did a final assembly and touch-up.

Here are a couple of shots of the hull and the deck during the painting:

Nothing unusual here. Just a variety of lighter browns drybrushed over a dark brown base coat. I then picked out the detail like the items on the deck. For these I used more muted colors, like khakis and tans, since I planned to make the vikings colorful.

Unfortunately, with the show fast upon us, we were severely pushed for time and I wasn't able to take proper pictures of the completed piece. I did manage to snap a few shots while at the show before the customer picked up the model:

The base was simply a piece of MDF. The water is Durham's water putty applied with an artist's spatula. I made the wave effects by dragging the spatula toward me and moving it back and forth in an S pattern, but also while rocking it a bit from side to side. Allison then painted the water colors on.

We also did some display Normans for Architects of War. These were the Conquest Plastics. While I am not normally a fan of plastics I did think these were pretty nice. The detail was fairly sharp and the assembly was easy. I especially liked how the lower arms attached  into a socket in the chainmail sleeve. This assembly avoids the seam at the shoulder normally found in plastic kits.

The shields are LMBS decals. Allison and I had to do a bit of work on them to get them to fit properly though. They were a tad bigger than the shields and had a hole in the center of them for a boss on the shield. This meant we had to paint the missing detail of the decal where the hole was. It isn't an easy task trying to match the colors on the decals so if you attempt it be prepared to put some time into the process.