A small handful of small Samurai

Quite a few years ago I got a Samurai army painted up professionally by Simon Clarke's Lurkio painting shop - the only army in my collection to be painted by someone else. This was mainly as I really didn't fancy (aka didn't think I was good enough) to paint up a Samurai army and do it justice.

In the process of deciding what figures to get painted though, I did buy a few different ranges before finally settling on Old Glory - and in a recent trawl through the spares box I happened to come across a few baggies of Essex Samurai that I'd considered and then rejected for the army. 

Having succesfully added some much easier to paint Light Infantry Ashigaru archers to the army last year, for some reason when I found these actual Samurai I decided that I might actually have a go at these figures too, and see if I could now paint them to a standard which was something even vaguely close to the pro-paint job on the rest of the Samurai in the army. 

And here they are - almost finished, apart from I am still waiting on some transfers for the large banners.

 

From a distance they actually look reasonable IMO - although its one of those "trick of the eye" things that if you zoom in, or blow up the picture too much they can look rather ropey.

The key techniques I used here were;

• Black undercoat, with the armour being done with a coat of Contrast Blood Angels Red straight onto the black. This seemed to give a good simulation of the red lacquer effect that you can often see in Samurai armour in museums
• The "dots" have been done in Skeleton Bone - which has the advantage of not being anywhere near as harsh as a flat white dots would have been. 
• I have also done a few stripes as well to break up the effect, and not tried to do every dot either - often it is just around the edges of a plate of armour rather than at every piece.
• The uniforms are done in solid normal colours to get a good coverage, and look different to the armour effect of contrast on black. 
• I also snuck in a few minor variations of legging and sock colours to make them slightly less uniform - the handful of "military green" belts also helps a lot with breaking things up too IMO.

As long as you keep at tabletop distances the impression is much better as your mind sort of assumes the dots are in the right places as there are too many of them to take in individually I suspect.

Here are some Ashigaru with naginata and a Samurai commander - again waiting for a transfer for his banner 

I followed the "mostly red" theme with them as well.

Here's a base next to a pro-painted base of Old Glory figures. 

The OG 15's are far heftier, as well as being better painted - so you'd really not want to mix them on a sngle base.  But for a couple of units of different status (in a different command maybe?) I'm still happy with how these have come out.