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. 

Blue Moon Swiss Pikemen

At Cold Wars I picked up a pack of Blue Moon 18mm Swiss Pikemen (15WS-105: Swiss Pikeman Advancing), partly because I was one pike block short* for my 15mm ADLG Swiss army, partly because I really like the small handful of Blue Moon figures I already own (namely their Three Musketeers set) and also as I just wanted to spend some money with traders in what was a very quiet, "even of lockdown" trader hall.

Those figures and now finally finished, and out of the pack of 30 figures I managed to conjure up two 12-man pike blocks (on 40x40 ADLG bases) as well as half a dozen halberdiers.  

The figures all came without pikes or weapons, so I also took the opportunity to try something I'd stumbled across online where a blogger gave instructions how to make plastic spears with actual tips - a much more sophisticated approach than the 'brass rod with the end painted silver" approach I'd been using beforehand. I've sadly failed to remember where I saw this idea, but I've dug out another site with exactly the same technique.

The figures were really clean and well cast out of the packet, and I duly followed instructions and created plastic pikes and halberds for them all with 0.8mm plastic rod, squeezed at the end and cut to shape. The pikes do have proper points, whilst the halberds are relatively unsophisticated long blades on the end of a pole. 

One downside I discovered however was that with the pikes being soft-ish plastic it was impossible to force the pikes through the partly-open lower hands of the men (which you can do with brass rod). As drilling out a load of hands which are cast close to the mens bodies wasn't something I really wanted to do, these pikemen ended up all holding their pikes at the butt-end in their left hands.  

I went with a black undercoat, drybrushed white using a tip from Dave on the Madaxeman Podcast a couple of weeks ago. I had throught this technique was about getting extra depth for the colours when using semi-transparent paints, but he pointed out that a white drybrush also really helps pick out the contours of the figure and guides your painting of them, which an all-black undercoat can make quite difficult to follow. 

Here they are almost done. As usual I used a very narrow colour palette, with white and red being the first two colours onto the figures. 

I've been struggling with getting good consistency and coverage from my go-to red, Army Painter Pure Red, and so recently changed to Vallejo Scarlet and Vallejo Dark Vermillion, both of which seem much better so far. The blue is a Vallejo Game Colour Electric Blue, and the yellow is Army Painter, but always on a full white undercoat. 

 

Unlike most of my other medieval figures the Swiss I have are generally not ink-washed, as their bright colours seems to work better if they are not muted - Swiss are stand-out troops anyway so why not make them "ping" a bit more? Paul Frith's 28mm Perry Swiss army also provided some inspiration for this approach when I played it last year at a competition - although it's not nearly as aggressively black-lined as these ones are.

 

I have however blacklined them - not a technique I usually do as it's a PITA, and not really compatible with ink-washing but here it seemed necessary to highlight the different blocks of colour. 

 

To give them a little more detail I added some white-on-red crosses onto some of their backs, sleeves and trousers. These I didn't blackline - there is a limit to my steadiness of hand!

The Blue Moon figures are very clean designs, but despite being marketed as 15mm by Old Glory UK I'm much more inclined to regard them as being the "15mm/18mm" scale as they are described by Blue Moon in the USA. 

Stood next to some Mirliton Swiss pikemen here the difference in stature and height is obvious, with the Blue Moon men being a full head taller than the Mirliton ones - although ensuring that the pikes are the same height on both blocks of men does go a long way to obscuring the difference in stature on the tabletop. 

Facing off against the Mirliton men I think my money is on the Blue Moon soldiers to win this particular push-of-pike! 

Here the QRF pikemen join the line on the left, with Blue Moon in the middle and Mirliton on the right of the photo. QRF are also "true 15mm" and are tiny next to the Blue Moon guys - the following photo where the Blue Moon figures are unpainted shows how the addition of equal-height pikes does tone down the difference in stature though. 

 

Overall I do really, really like these figures, but they are big, and stylistically very different to other ranges so it would be pretty much impossible to mix them in the same unit with any other manufacturer. Side by side in different units is just about OK at tabletop ranges though. 

This one packet of unarmoured pikemen also doesn't quite have enough variety of poses for my taste  (there are too many flat beret hats, which when painted in a range of colours can make the unit look a little like a packet of M&M's when viewed from above!) so I'd buy a mix of armoured and unarmoured men next time and mix them together were I to do this experiment again.

The jury is very much out however on whether the plastic pike-making experiment is one I'll continue with, as I've already snapped a couple of pikes with just normal handling. They do glue back on very easily (the plastic doesn't melt with Superglue thankfully) but I suspect the problem may be that the 0.8mm plastic rod I used (from Plastruct) is either just too thin, or too brittle to really work as it should. Creating the points is easy, and very effective so I may try that part of the technique again with 1mm rod, or even go thicker for spears for some 28mm figures. 

Casting around online the more permanent solution seems to be to buy a cheap sweeping brush head, and cut off the bristles - but that's currently harder to do with online shopping as Amazon doesn't tend to say how thick the individual bristles are on the brushes they are selling!

And finally, here they are with their Gnome of Zurich leader hurling his stinky cheese at the enemy! 

* This is of course a lie. I don't "need" any more pike blocks, I have got 9 already, and a load of other medieval ones who could be pressed into Swiss service if needed. But as long as I don't tell myself I'm sure I won't realise.

Clogging Hell - We're all going Dutch!

A recent one-day event in Oxford gave me a chance to wheel out some almost forgotten FoG:Renaissance troops in 15mm scale to take part in a tightly themed C16 competition for the armies involved in the Great Rebellions of that era - the French Wars of Religion, the 80 Years War of Dutch Independence and the many Peasant Revolts across Europe.

Given the multitude of choices - and because no-one had bitten at my incredibly well crafted attempt at a joke on the FoGR Forum along the lines of..

• "How big is your army?"

• "It's Huguenot.."

..I ended up taking the 80YW Dutch, with a vague plan to batter my opponents senseless with artillery whilst reducing my opportunity to make the sorts of mistakes that someone who hasn't played these rules for ages might do by having a plan that didn't really involve moving my troops at all. 

The armies duly swept back and forth across the tabletops in textbook checker board formations and much Dutch courage was taken by all sides. And I used a ship! 

Read on for the usual rubbish-packed and ship-tastic reports to see how the Cloggers managed to do in these 3 FoGR battle reports

Piracy on the high seas of... Leighton Buzzard!

Leighton Buzzard is not normally associated with Piracy on the high seas, nor is it twinned with any exotic ex-Colonial cities from far flung continents (although being twinned with a town called Titisee is admittedly vaguely amusing).

But, even so it was the venue for the latest round of the UK FoGR One-Day Competition ....and so on a bright Sunday morning my Buccaneers yet again took to the table in a flurry of bad dice, even worse puns, and some oddly appropriate commentary on lawn care !

Read on for all three reports!

Burton Doubles 2016 - the Multimedia Extravaganza!

Burton, a classic and historic venue ... the ideal setting for a video and audio online multi-platform interactive assault on common sense and common decency as Madaxeman.com launches a PODCAST... and a VIDEO PODCAST to supplement the match reports!!

See (and hear) how the Triumverate Roman & Jewish army fared against the Romano-British & Patricians, 3K Chinese & Hsiung Nu, Armenians & Romans and Parthians (Elemayan) & Hatrenes in 4 separate fully detailed ADLG match reports!

Or, you can just read the damned things on the web just like in the olden days ...

QR Miniatures Pancerni

Just realised that I'd not posted any pictures of the Pancerni after putting up some carbine-armed horse from QR of Poland.

Well, here they are (click on any photo for a larger version)

I added the rather oversized lance myself - I think the figures actually come with swords and stuff, but I seem to have mislaid some of the hands (which are separate)

Nice to see someone actually shooting a carbine from horseback

This shows them next to Old Glory Pancerni. They are a little less bulky in these shots, but on the table the difference is really not noticeable at all.

PIRATES! The Buccaneers return in 4 more match reports

The "I can't believe it's a serious army choice" Buccaneers return in 4 match reports from the BHGS Doubles, taking on opponents from the year 1695 in a fury of pirate-based action.

See a 900AP Pirate army in action against non-historical and entirely infeasible opponents such as The Tatars, The Anglo-Dutch, The French and finally, The Poles and Lithuanians as Piracy reaches shorelines previously thought safe from the scourge of the Caribbean (especially the Tatars, on account of Mongolia technically being land-locked).

The reports even feature proper maps and stuff so you can make some sense of the action, as well as just being vaguely amused by the bits I've spliced into the reports..

The Pirate Ship is now finished...

The Old Glory 8 Gun Barque is now finished... completing the Pirate army

I must admit to being quite pleased with it. Admittedly the rigging is a bit, well, jerry-rigged, but it does allow me to take the masts down for transport and storage - and it allows you to see the deck and crew very well too.

Lots more photos on my Facebook page

Great Service from Old Glory 15's

Not really news as such, but I just wanted to post a public thanks to Old Glory 15's, who managed to get an order fulfilled, out and posted to a US address I was due to be visiting (to take advantage of their US post-free rate for large orders) - and all during the week before they went on site to Historicon as well

I'm now the happy owner of a huge number of 15mm Renaissance Old Glory figures - watch out for them being painted over the next few months!

Old Glory January sale as well..

Old Glory US have a sale until the end of January offering 30% off for orders of $101-$399 and 40% off for orders of $400 or more. Their website can also be reached via the 15mm Ancient Suppliers Index on this site.