The Six Samurai

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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,

  1. Basecoat: VMC English Uniform
  2. Wash: GW Reikland Fleshshade
  3. Highlight: VMC English Uniform
  4. Highlight: 50/50 VMC English Uniform/VGC Barbarian Flesh
  5. Highlight: VGC Barbarian Flesh
  6. Glaze: 50/50 Reikland Fleshshade/GW Contrast Medium
  7. 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!

16 thoughts on “The Six Samurai”

  3. I’ve been thinking about painting something Samurai inspired lately (which is as far as I’ll get because I’ve got plenty of projects as it is) and so its neat to see you tackle some. I love the freehand and its a must when painting samurai! I love that you used woodblock prints for inspiration as well. I love that style of art and find it inspiring.

    I hope you’ll do some more Samurai in 2024 and you might check out Test of Honour as a potential rule system as well. It is a skirmish game so you won’t have to paint a boatload of minis to get a game in.

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    1. Thanks Jeff! Would love to see you tackle some kimonos at some stage!
      I’ve heard of test of honour but never read it, I’ll have to look it up!
      A friend and I have also toyed with the idea of writing some samurai rules for MESBG just because we like that system so much.

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      1. There is also a ruleset called Ronin from Osprey that I don’t know much about. I might be remembering wrong but I think John uses that or possible another rule system for his samurai.

        MESBG rules could definitely work well with Samurai. The heroic abilities make a lot of sense to me with the setting as well. It will be interesting to see what you go with!

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      2. I’ll add Ronin to the list, have quite liked osprey systems in the past so I’m keen to look at that one.
        MESBG is such a good system for that, you can play a historical type game easily enough as it is at its core a low fantasy setting, and can tone it up by including shamans etc for that extra supernatural kick if you’re into that!

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      5. That is a great point! The Roman era was heavy on melee combat and MESBG has bow limits if I remember right so that could work really well. Broken Legions is heavily based off of the old LOTRSBG rules because the designer helped with those before he went on to write Broken Legions so there’s that connection as well!

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