Steven's prehistoric project complete...

 'Hi Dad,

It has been ages since my last update, again. However, I have ‘finished’ the prehistoric project, at least for now (yes, there are still some things unpainted, and some things I would like but don’t yet have). However, my WW2 Germans are calling for attention again.

Since my last update I painted some cavemen ( Figure 1 ), hunting dogs ( Figure 2 ) and flame-bearers   ( Figure 3 ) by Irregular Miniatures. The latter only came in a single pose (a surprise coming from Irregular), so I did a few minor conversions adding furs, beards etc, and even made one of them into a female ( Figure 4 ). To go with them, I made some flame markers from cotton wool and painted them using the airbrush ( Figure 5 ). The flame markers have more general use, of course.

I spent a lot of time on some essentially scratch-built models. Firstly, I did a jub-jub bird (from a scenario in the Palaeo Diet rules) based on a 25mm Pendraken duck modified and painted to look a bit like a golden pheasant ( Figure 6 ).

I also scratch-built a pair of huts using the modelling putty you gave me, following a very usefulguide online, here. It was also fun putting a few extra details on the bases such as the firepit and a pile of mammoth tusks. I based the (previously posted) Baueda orc house too whilst I was at it ( Figure 7 ).

As an army review ( Figure 8 ) of sorts, I think it all comes to:

 18 cavemen (Khurasan) 

 Six converted Libyan archers (Khurasan)

 10 hominids (Khurasan)

 10 cavemen (Irregular)

 Seven flame-bearers (Irregular)

 Eight hunting dogs (Irregular)

 10 flame markers (scratch-built)

 Three large herbivores: mammoth, rhinoceros and hippo (toys, possibly Mojo)

 Three sabretooth tigers (Khurasan)

 One cave bear (Khurasan)

 10 small herbivores each of: horses, deer and goats (Pendraken)

 Three rabbits (Pendraken)

 Twelve 10mm wolves (Copplestone)

 Two 15mm giant wolves (Demonworld)

 Three animal lairs (Copplestone)

 One stone circle (Copplestone)

 One jub-jub bird (Pendraken)

 One hut (Baueda)

 Two huts (scratch-built)

So that is a total of 131 items. Given this was supposed to be a little side project, I may have gotten sucked in a bit too much.

Figure 1 Irregular Miniatures cavemen.

Figure 2 Hunting dogs. I tried to paint some of them as sort of transitional from wolf to dog.

Figure 3 Flame-bearers. The original is third from left; the rest have had some sort of conversion. I painted a reddish glow from the flame on their face and chest area, although it isn’t very clear in the photos.

Figure 4 The converted female. In addition to the obvious, I trimmed slivers off her limbs and body to try and give her a more feminine body type.

Figure 5 Fire markers made from cotton wool, airbrushed with white, then yellow, orange, red, and finally black to hopefully give a reasonable fire effect.

Figure 6 Jub-jub bird. The base was scratch built - the tree stump was green stuff over a wire skeleton, and I added a few other bits to the base to make a mini diorama. Spot the rabbit and the cotton wool spider web.

Figure 7 Stone-age huts. The middle one is from the Baueda, the other two were scratch built from putty, as were the items around the huts. I tried to make the fire look like proper fire.

Figure 8 Everything all together. It does look quite good, I think.