Trimming the bush and skinning the villagers

When Samurai/Feudal Japan reappeared on the radar locally, a few weeks ago, I ordered a set of blossoming Sakura trees ( to share with Gunbird) as well as a set of bamboo. The bamboo arrived earlier on this week, but turned out a bit on the small-ish size:

Sufficient, but not quite imposing enough for the bamboo maze/forest I had in mind. So an extra set of larger bamboo stems was ordered the same night...
While waiting for those to arrive I set about trimming the excess flash off these bamboo stems. I've got a hundred of them to go, so I'm doing it in little batches, clipping a few every time I have a spare few minutes, like when waiting for the teawater to boil, etc.:

 I'm already a quarter of the way through the bag...
Once they are all clean (enough, with this soft plastic, I can't expect to get it perfect, and they're supposed to look good en masse, not being inspected individually up close), I'll start making a test bush, so I can start serious production once the larger stems have arrived. I'm hoping they'll arrive in the next week, so I can do this in a couple of days off I have heading my way.

Today, after a leisurely stroll in the forest, I painted the skin on my first 5 villagers:

The painting is a bit rougher than I would have liked. Apparently, I'm more out of practice than I thought... Still having a little bit of the shakes from a flu earlier this week may also have contributed.
I'm not too worried as they're essentially just set dressing/ objective markers.
The wash on the hats and woven basket are currently drying, maybe I can just finish those before supper?
Hopefully next weekend I can get the most of them dressed.

See you next time!

It takes a child to raise a village

In this case, my son needing someone to assist/supervise him with his homework.  As sitting there, staring at the ceiling until he needed me isn't my thing, I took my cutting mat, some tools and a batch of mini's along:

Luckily (for me, not for him!) he had enough homework that I could also get around to basing them:

So, I have been a good parent, had a nice father-son chat as we both worked on our own things and I gained a batch of mini's ready for primer and (start of) paint tomorrow. Win-win-win!

These are a sort of spontaneous collaboration with Gunbird, as he has enthusiastically started building a samurai village. As we both have an interest in medieval Japan wargaming, I might as well provide the population!

The project is (unsurprisingly, seeing my track record) threatening to escalate a bit though. My original plan was to limit myself to the Gempei War miniatures from The Assault Group, with some supporting mini's from Perry to fill the gaps, but I've already ordered a Koryu Buntai from the Ronin range by Northstar Miniatures, and find myself eyeing other buntai and more "modern" samurai figures from Perry, Kingsford and Northstar... We'll see how far this goes...

See you next time!

Pants painting

Well, here she is, the finished Miko (Well, almost, I still need to flock the base):

As I would be using much of the same colours, she was joined on the painting table by one of her travelling companions, the itinerant priest:

While the mika maintains some effort to remain neat and presentable, you can see the priest just goes about in his travel-stained clothes.

Both miniatures are from the Perry Samurai range, with some conversion. The Mika has had her hakama added, and the priest has the chest of drawers added to his back. (The RPG character he represents has sworn a sacred vow to only own what he can carry with him, hence the huge travelling case. When creating the character, another friend asked "Why not just get a horse?" To which both the player of the priest and me exclaimed simultaneously: "Do you have any idea how heavy horses are, he could never lift one, let alone carry it!" :D I love my RPG group... )

Now that these are done, I intend to get back to painting my Escher, as well as building some terrain for a mate.

See you next time!

Pants sculpting

A while ago, I ran a DnD Campaign set in mythological Japan, which sort of petered out over the years. We alternated GM-ing in the group, each GM having their own campaing running, but life and busy calendars caused longer and longer pauzes between games, until they quietly slipped into hiatus.

Earlier this week, I've been dared into restarting my campaign, with the promise of one of my mates restarting his as well. Being the disciplined and focussed individual that I am, I naturally succumbed immediately to this temptation. :P
At the time, I had been working on making miniatures for each character in the party. I don't want to use these to handle combat and such (it's an RPG, not a skirmish wargame after all), but more as visual portraits and occasionally to clarify things like marching order or relative positions.

One of the PCs is a Miko or temple maiden. Of which there are preciously few miniatures... Luckily Perry Miniatures does a few packs of medieval Japanese villagers, which contains a woman holding a fan. Perfect for my needs concerning pose and style, she just lacks the bright red hakama typical of Miko. So, out came the greenstuff and tools (And hence, the title of this post...).

Here's the result:

For those that are interested in such things, the rest of the party consists of an itinerant priest (which you can partially see in background), a rural samurai or ji-zamurai, and two female samurai. Except for the two women warriors, all now have miniatures ready for paint. I'm still looking for suitable minis, with armour in the right style and the right weapons.

See you next time!

Crestfallen knights

a.k.a. Heraldic Surgery...

What's this about? Well, let me tell you:

Somewhere in the 90's I collected a small number of GW Bretonnian miniatures. I loved the Perry sculpts and the look and feel of the army, but it never really got off the ground, due to lack of interest in WHFB in the erstwhile gaming club. The army got mothballed, but I never could let the miniatures I did collect for it go. Which is much to my advantage now, as it provided me with the knight and retinue I've shown in my recent posts. In my opinion, the new GW Bretonnians just have nothing on those classic Perry sculpts and designs.
This week I had been digging through this small stash of Chivalrous mini's again, and had a lucky break:
I knew I had the classic Grail Knight on foot twice, as well as a mounted grail knight with a sorta-kinda matchin crest. My original plan was to use one Grail Knight on foot with the mounted one as a single character, and sorta gloss over the non-matching crest. Which didn't really sit all that well with me.
In my digging, I discovered I somehow also had acquired a second one of said mounted Grail Knight!

Which led to an enthousiastic bout of sawing and glueing. Because 2 foot knights, 2 mounted knights, and 2 pairs of matching crests plus some tools and glue lead to this:

(In this pic, the unmodified models are the two closest to the centre, the two on the outside are the "swappees")

I took a jewellers saw, and one each of the mounted and foot knights. I then carefully sawed off the crests on both of them, just under the torse (the twisted cloth ribbon around the helmet). There is a natural dividing line there, and the underside for the torse creates a sharp shadow over it, making it easier to fill any gaps and hide the join.
I then simply swapped the crests around and glued them back on. I still need to fill the gaps and resculpt the knots at the rear of the torses. But once that is done, I have two more matching mounted and dismounted knights. Which means two more potential retinues for a Chivalry/Chanson de Geste game!

Sadly I don't have enough of the old GW archers and men-at-arms to provide them both with a full retinue, and certainly no squires for them. But I'm not too worried about that. The old Bretonnian infantry still pop up on Ebay and second hand markets regularly, plus the Perry twins have their lovely Agincourt to Orleans range. And I'm in no particular hurry, so I could also just wait for their recently previewed/spoilered HYW plastics to be released. And if I'm not to worried to stay in the HYW/Bretonnian/Perry style and look, there are plenty of other nice medieval mini's to choose from.
I really should be concentrating on painting suitable monsters, beasts and villains for them and dungeoneering in general at this point anyway so I have plenty of time to make my choice...
All I can say is, it is, or soon will be, a good time to be a feudal lord!