Samurai and ronin, part 3

After a week of painting 2-3 hours per day my armoured samurai and ashigaru are done! I’ll be mixing and matching these with the ronin I painted earlier to form two little war bands.

I didn’t want to use the same colour scheme for each miniature as if they were part of a larger army, because that would look odd alongside the more individual ronin models. I did want them to look coherent, though, if that makes sense. As a compromise, I gave all ashigaru the same black armour, but changed the colour of their tunics, the stitches on their armour plates and their war banners. For the samurai I did the opposite. Each has differently coloured armour, but their tunics are all grey. This also helps to make them stand out among the rank-and-file ashigaru.

These were quite a bit more work to paint then the unarmoured ronin, but a lot of fun. I really like how they turned out. I shouldn’t have varnished them on such a hot day (34˚C), though, because there are some very annoying air bubbles in the varnish on some of the models. At least, I assume that’s the reason... Admittedly, when you hold them in front of your eyes you can barely see them. When you’re looking at the pictures at 500% of their original size, though, they are really obvious. You live and you learn, I guess. Still pretty chuffed with the result, though.

Comments

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Space Wolves killteam

Time for my second 100 pt. kill team, this time featuring the ever popular sci-fi Vikings known as Space Wolves. It’s a nice little group of three Intercessors and three Reivers. The new Primaris models are massive compared to the old Tactical Space Marines and to make them look even more impressive I based hem on bits of cork painted to look like rocks. The models were primed in Citadel Fenrisian grey. After this, I painted most of the details apart from the faces of the two tough guys that are too cool to wear helmets. I then gave everything a black wash and added (a bit crudely) the odd edge highlight. I then painted the faces following a pretty simple process of applying a base skin colour, washing with brown and then highlighting with a lighter skin tone. Finally, I drybrushed the rocks with dark grey, then light grey and finally very gently with white. As a finishing touch I added two layers of AK Snow Sprinkles for a nice half-melted snow look. I took my...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

Search This Blog