Up first we have some humans. If you're running a Dinosaur themed game then there are certain things that are required before you may begin. One of these things is obviously the Dinosaurs themselves. The other thing is something for them to eat. In particular something hubris flavoured.
I've said before that the 10mm scale was superbly matched for Dinosaurs, as it makes the mighty saurians about the size of a regular miniature with the obvious advantages this brings in terms of affordability and painting. I'm not honestly sure how well this carries over to the tiny fiddly human meat chunks. On the one hand the reduced scale does mean a reduced level of detail, and thus less work that needs messing around with. On the other there's not THAT much reduced detail, and what is left is VERY small.
If anything I suppose that extra amount of detail makes them a lot more challenging than you're typical 6mm infantry, although really I approached them in much the same way. I.E. pick out 2 or 3 colours and don't worry too much about trying to put the eyes in. The facial hair of course if another story.
Something else you may find yourself needing is objective markers, which is nicely taken care of by these egg nests. They're not bad, but I can't help but think that it shouldn't be too difficult to sculpt your own out of a bit of green stuff rather than buy them. Still, handy to have.
Having food for the carnivores sorted out, the other thing we'd need is some food for the herbivores. Now, I'd already sorted out some plants previously. But whilst I was shopping for some of that lichen stuff I stumbled across these.
They're scenery for model railways. A mixed lot of palms and cycads, perfect for constructing a cyclopean prehistoric jungle, but with the added advantage of being usable as alien jungles or whatever in 28mm scale games as well. They weren't expensive, so I figured why not?
The major reason why not proved to be the difficulty of getting undercoat to adhere to them properly. Not that this became particularly obvious until I started actually trying to paint them. Just think, there are I am flinging around a thick coat of green whilst great flakes of crusty white proceed to drop everywhere. It was like an outbreak of dandruff in a leper colony.
Once I'd got all that wallpapered over they started to come together though. Probably would have been better if I'd had a few more shades of brown to work with before I started, but that's hindsight for you. And whilst I did manage to mix things up a bit, by the time I had some new paints I was really past caring all that much.
It's funny, but painting this jungle reminded me a lot of the old days painting games workshop armies. And not just because the level of detail was pretty poor. Boom and, indeed, boom.
No the nostalgia value came from finally being stuck painting a large amount of stuff I wasn't really all that interested in, and just trying to get it all done with in order to actually use it for a game. It's a very different discipline to how I've been working up to now. Which has been mainly just painting whatever took my fancy as and when. Really I think that, in the future, I may be better off breaking such projects into smaller portions and taking time to do something more interesting in between to clear the palate somewhat. I know that there are a few things I could probably do to improve these a little. Extra highlighting on the leaves, better washes on the bases. But the fact is that I really don't care enough to at the moment. They're up to scratch for what they're going to be used for, which is tabletop scenery. They're not really display pieces. Individually they may not be of a super high standard, but en mass they do look rather effective. Which is just as well, considering that there are an awful lot of them.
But now, with all this in hand we can finally see if we can't actually work out how to PLAY the game. That should be interesting.
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