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.

Aren't you a little short for a Samurai?

Well that was quick! Four hours after deciding to paint the classic Citadel orientals they were done!

These fine fellows are both elderly Games Workshop Dwarf Adventurers (still available here). I'm using them to represent the Pathfinder classes and races of a Dwarf Samurai and a Gnome Ninja. Why a Gnome? Say it out loud... "Gnome Ninja". That's why! Something I forgot to mention last time was that all of my Oriental Adventures party are being based on these cool Black Cat Bases bamboo base inserts. They're cast metal and all sorts of nifty.

So, the Samurai first. The armour is actually sculpted in as authentic a manner as you can when you are dealing with fantasy! It represents a later period suit where solid breastplates had become the norm to try to defeat the rising power of the handgun. Yep, this armour was being worn in the 1600's, while Britain was fighting the civil war with muskets and cannon the Way of Horse and Bow (Bushido) was still king in Japan. I started off the model by giving the whole thing a coat of Boltgun Metal and Black which was further drabbed down with Badab Black. I wanted the metalwork present but to retreat behind the brighter colours of the silk bindings and laquered helmet.

Speaking of bindings, the red was my usual Blood Angels method shortened to: Mechrite Red and Blood Red mix basecoat, Blood Red overbrush, Blazing Orange and Vomit Brown mix highlights. In this case every line of silk in the armour needed to be highlighted individually. For those who don't know, Samurai armour is actually thousands of thick silk cords plaited and woven around steel plates. Silk is so good at slowing cutting edges that it was in the original bulletproof vests. This armour is perfect for resisting the slashing cuts so familiar to wielders of the katana. The plates helped to stop arrows from penetrating. I glazed the red cords in a mix of Red Ink and Glaze Medium and then picked out the yellow contrast threads in Tausept Ochre, a little white added for highlights and a Gryphonne Sepia wash sealed the deal.

Most of the sculpting was nice considering this model comes from the mid-eighties but the katana wasn't quite up to spec. To make this stand out - and to make it look different to a steel katana, thus solving the sculpting problem - I decided to make a jade sword. Jade is a magical stone to the Chinese and I thought I would use it as a Ghost Touch katana (it can hit etheral creatures). This was achieved with a base coat of Vallejo Scurf Green highlighted with increasing amounts of Bleached Bone. Incidently, those are furry boots and they also are perfectly authentic!

Sadly, the ninja sculpt has not weathered the passage of time so well. The arms are awful and a real indicator of just how far GW have come over their thirty years. Most of the painting was actually correcting and minimising the effects of the wonky sculpting so don't expect miracles in the close-ups!

Painting any model like this - ninjas, imperial asassins, policemen - is an exercise in making areas of adjacent black stand out. I discussed this at length in the Hot Fuzz article so I won't go through it all again, suffice to say that used Scorched Brown for the leather breastplate and mask, Adeptus Battlegrey and Charadon Granite for the cloth and then several washes of Badab Black!

With that the Oriental Adventures adventuring party is almost complete! Just the sumo to go and I'm going to try some serious tatooing on that bad boy...

TTFN