Bushido, for charity!

Welcome one and all to this, the very first post of 2013 from Pirate Viking Painting! Huzzah! And I am delighted to report that it is a terribly ethical one as I have finished yet more stuff for charity. The Paint the City Pink campaign had several prizes donated back to the auction and I volunteered to paint them for free to add some value. I did the Pulp City gang a little while back and now the first of two Bushido sets from GCT Studios, the Prefecture of Ryu.

These are very pretty figures, and the closest I have seen in sculpting to getting Samurai armour right. Of course, this is a fantasy Japan so it doesn't matter all that much! Painting anything Japanese is something of a nightmare, there are lots of twiddly bits and the colour pallete is unfamiliar to our western eyes.

Look at some pictures of real samurai armour, they are a riot of colours. I thus resolved to use a rare colour combination for me, a tetrach. Four colours in two contrasting pairs, in this case red and green along with orange and blue. Note that in a tetrach the colours are also complementary to another colour, orange and red, green and blue and so on.

At some point in the painting I realised that the blue I was using (Kantor highlighted with Hoeth) was far too blue, too cold for the scheme and was making it a jarring clash. I warmed it up to a delightful indigo by glazing with violet wash. Wound up a gorgeous colour and created the harmonious tones I was going for.

For the skin tone I added Ungor Flesh to the Cadian Fleshtone but otherwise treated it as normal! Selecting the placement of the colours was what was important in this scheme, not necessarily the techniques used to apply them, as in the end it was mostly careful build up of various washes to achieve the effects.

The end result is exactly what I wanted, a general feeling of a red and indigo colour scheme with enough interferance from the green and orange elements to give that riot-of-colours oriental feel without compromising western aesthetics.

The final model in contrast was simplicity itself, ninjas usually are! Just pick a different black highlight colour for each area of the model and then use a couple of black washes to drab it all down. Lovely.

I am going to do a full on review of all of the Busido models that I have my hands on when they are all finished, but for now, just feast your eyes and enjoy!

TTFN

I've decided that I will do the Wargaming fitness spots like this, beneath the main posts, after the TTFN so that anyone who simply doesn't care can just ignore them! For the first one, I thought I would lay out the problem. I am 33, 6 foot tall and weigh 137.1 kg, that's 21st 8lb or 302 lb for our colonial cousins. Yikes, better news is that the weight is only 44.4% fat. I am actually a big guy even without the fat. This means that BMI is meaningless (it usually is btw) and so I will be using Body Fat % to "fix" me. Healthy range for guys my age is 9-19%, overweight is 19-25%. I think a realistic first goal is just to shift from the obese range to overweight. That means shifting my body fat from 44% to 25%. That means loosing 26.5 kg. Or 4 stone 2 lb (58 lbs) of fat. I don't care what my weight is, as it will probably go up on reengaging muscle groups. I care about the fat. Also, focusing on this well help with my truly scary stat. A visceral fat count of 21. This is a fairly abstract measure from my machine but the safe range is 1-12. Eep. This is the really dangerous stuff and needs to change. Some people can be overweight but not have this, my wife is an 8 on that scale. Seems that my body just loves to clag fat around my internal organs. This will not stand! I declare war on claggy fat.

Well, that is all for now, I'll let you know in a month or so how I am doing.

Peace out.