Avernos' Rorke's Drift

In a quick word about building the minis, I used the plastic sets from Warlord Games and scattered in some old Wargames Foundry Zulus in red coats for a splash of colour. Two things I did when building the units was to try and restrict the smaller shields to the unmarried units, the Zulus had started to move away from large shields with the arrival of black powder weapons. This gave the younger units a newer style small shield and the older married troops the larger one. There is no evidence that they were split in this way it’s purely an aesthetic choice and that’s all. The second thing I did was to clip off the end of the longer throwing spear, I wanted all the Zulu to have a short stabbing spear it also cuts down on breakages from the long haft in the box.

A long time ago the majority of the Zulus got a Black spray undercoat, a heavy drybrush over everything and then shield colours and spear heads picked out in metal. En masse they looked let’s be fair, okay ish. But up close they were pretty rough. Now I’m going back and adding some detail. I will hold my hands up right off the bat and say if you’ve read the previous entries that I didn’t follow the shield designs for the amabutho correctly. Trying to point out to someone that a red shield with a white spot is not the same as a red and white shield is too much hassle. So instead I have black, white, red and red and white. So let’s have a look at the generic paints used for all the minis.

I used mainly charred brown for skintone, with some dark fleshtone thrown in for more diversity.

Heavy Brown was used for all the spears, axes and the pole that holds the shield hides. Heavy Sienna I used for any rifles and the knobkierie (the heavy wooden mace with the ball head)

For the rear of the shields I used Buff, this was also used for any black and white furs on loincloths and the top of the shields. The Kakhi is used on any animal skins, loin cloths and Goldbrown for furs. I mostly just mixed and matched these three colours where I felt like it to break up the uniformity of the figures.

shield colours mainly, although ivory is used with the unmarried a lot more. Black also is used for headbands and detailing.