A Sudanese sidetrack

So there I was, happily painting Artizan British NWF models and thinking about getting some Pathans, when things appear to have taken a swerve...

A few years ago now Boyes (a regional department store - like a sort of downmarket Woolworths - or Wilkinsons for my younger reader) decided to get into selling Toy Soldiers. It started with quite a bang with shelves groaning with Airfix, PSC, Flames of War, Perry, Warlord and, of course, GW. And slowly it has retreated from that place as it's discovered what sells or, more pertinently, what doesn't. And what doesn't sell, at least in the volumes to keep Boyes interested, is anything other than GW and paint/hobby supplies.
The soft plastics were the first to go, followed by Warlord, FoW and all the Airfix that isn't planes. Now it seems that the Perry range and PSC is being dispensed with - or all the stuff that isn't Napoleonics at any rate. So the other week when I was in there I noticed this.

Specifically I noticed this:

A box of the Perry Ansar at half-price!
I said to myself that I've got no intention of playing Sudan, I'm doing NWF and that's that.
So I left them on the shelf and went away.
Actually that's not true I bought the only box of Afrika Korps they had for a tenner and then I went away. But that's a post for another time.

However when I got home I had the odd and crazy thought that maybe by combining bits of the Sudanese with some of the Gripping Beast plastic Arabs I could fashion some Slavers for games of Darkest Africa, and maybe some of them would pass as DA tribesemen too.

So a day or two later I popped back and bought a box.
And when I got them home they were all lovely and nice looking and sticking them anywhere near the GB Arabs seemed like a terrible thing to do. So I figured that maybe I could make a couple of units for TMWWBK (pronounced Tim Wubbuk, the Canadian lumberjack) and that wouldn't be too bad. And I had six Perry highlanders I'd bought to use for DA and not finished so maybe they'd paint up for a unit to use against them. And perhaps if you didn't look to close I could use the NWF models and....and before I knew it this had happened.

Oh.

Anyway I've done quick and dirty paint-jobs on sixteen of them that is, pretty much the same as I did the African Tribesmen, but the whole thing washed with Coat D'Arms Brown Wash rather than woodstain dip.

The photography hasn't been kind - they don't look half as messy as this.

So now apparently I'm going to do Sudan Colonial gaming and I own a copy of The Sword and the Flame and I'm still painting NWF models and I don't know what's going on really...