December 2023 – Lair of the Lagomorph

The Six Samurai

A week or so ago I watched Kurosawa’s Ran and after that unsurprisingly felt the need to paint some samurai! Luckily for me a little over a year ago I ordered from Perry Miniatures a small force of Sengoku period Japanese with the intent of painting them up for an as yet undecided system (Hail Caesar is an option, and so is Clash of Katanas). Alongside these I ordered this set of unarmoured samurai, and it’s these I decided to paint up.

These were a nice break from the Warhammer models I’ve been painting recently, even if they were somewhat challenging. I have no real plans for these models beyond a fun painting experience at the moment as they don’t really fit with the rest of the models I ordered which are armoured for war, but after seeing the costumes in Ran I knew I wanted to paint some kimonos!

For the colours and the patterns on these I used a book of Japanese wood block paintings I had at home as a reference, never directly copying patterns but generally inspiring myself from them. Most of the colours I saw in these were blue/red/green alongside white and black, hence the scheme you see on these.

You can see I got adventurous on some of these and kept others rather simple. I’d say it’s nice to have some variety, but truth is some of these patterns were rather tricky to replicate consistently and I didn’t want to do that too many times!

The skin on these was a bit of an experiment as I’d never tried to paint Asian skin tones before. I’m pretty satisfied with the results so I’ll record them here for when I get to painting the army!

Acronyms: VMC – Vallejo Model Color, VGC – Vallejo Game Color, GW – Citadel/Games Workshop,

Basecoat: VMC English Uniform
Wash: GW Reikland Fleshshade
Highlight: VMC English Uniform
Highlight: 50/50 VMC English Uniform/VGC Barbarian Flesh
Highlight: VGC Barbarian Flesh
Glaze: 50/50 Reikland Fleshshade/GW Contrast Medium
Highlight: VGC Barbarian Flesh

The basing is a mix of Woodland Scenics foam flocks and GW static flock as well as some crushed up dead leaves for colour.

These are likely the last models I’ll paint in 2023, and not a bad way to finish the year! Plenty to look forward to in 2024, with the release of the relaunch of Warhammer Fantasy (as The Old World!) confirmed for the start of the year. I hope everyone has a lovely new year celebration and I’ll likely post next in January some time!

Bolt Thrower

WHFB

I’ve been on a small holiday this weekend, taking Friday off work and going up to Broome for a few days, which made for a lovely break. As an aside I really recommend going there if you ever get the chance, it’s quite an amazing location. I got back tonight and found I had the urge to get back into some painting so I finished off some reinforcements for my Dwarfs!

I’d actually started painting these a couple of weeks back and had the mostly finished by the time we left for Broome so there wasn’t much to do to get them finished up, but still nice to be able to to call them done!

This is a metal model from the range refresh Dwarfs got in late 6th edition Warhammer, which dates it to around 2005 I think. It’s a nice model, and I really like the crew although the bolt thrower itself was a bit fiddly to put together as multipart metal models tend to be.

There are some fun details on the, models such as the bolt held up by the middle crewman which has a rune from the game – Flakkson’s Rune of Seeking – carved into its tip (bonus to hit against flying creatures for those of you that are wondering!).

Painting-wise, these models are much like the rest of the Dwarf army, that is they follow the scheme I presented back in May.

It’s nice to add some more models to my Dwarf army, which I will be growing over time as I get through painting up the collection I purchased a while back. I do really enjoy painting Dwarfs, which is a good thing as I have quite a few more to paint!

The Warrens

Terrain, WHFB

It’s been a little while between updates, work has been rather busy and painting time has suffered as a result, but I’ve still been busy in the background! Quite a few models started over the last month, and unfortunately not many finished! Hopefully they will grace these pages soon, but for now here’s something I started this weekend and finished up early this week.

If you remember the map I drew for the Border Princes campaign, you might remember an area called “The Warrens”, that had a scattering of tall stones pictured in the area. This area has a special scenario associated with it (aptly named Rock Labyrinth!) that requires the board to be covered in rocky outcrops. This makes movement very difficult for ranked up regiments as you might imagine, and the scenario allows normally ranked units to fight in skirmish formation to ease their passage through the board.

The scenario consequently requires a great many rocks to be placed on the battlefield, many more than I had access to in my terrain collection so I decided to make up a batch for it.

These rocks are carved blocks of polystyrene, roughed up with a large wire brush and covered in homemade texture paint (mix of PVA glue, paint, sand, and bicarb soda). This texturing stage I did with my 3-year-old son who greatly enjoyed himself (He somehow got some on his back despite my best efforts to cover him with an apron!).

The goal was to have enough of these to play the Rock Labyrinth scenario on a 4ft by 4ft board, appropriate for the game size we’ll be playing during the campaign. The photo above shows them on a board of that size. It looks pretty cramped which is just right, mission accomplished there I’d say!

Turns out these rocks make for some fun backdrops for miniature photography so I couldn’t resist posing some models amongst them.

Here’s some proper dwarven terrain!

These were really fun to make, if a bit messy (I had the vacuum running while I was carving and still got polystyrene balls everywhere!). I look forward to playing some games using them, and I’m sure you’ll see them in the background of miniature shots in the near future.