Analogue Painting Challenge: Ronin #46

(pre-written and scheduled to post on Boxing Day while I'm down in Sussex recovering from Tuesday's festival of gluttony!)

Well, here you go, my first entry to the 3rd Analogue Painting Challenge is my "entry fee", a lovingly painted 25/28mm Samurai figure which will shortly be wending it's way over the Atlantic to Curt.

The figure is a mid/lat 1980s Citadel Miniatures Samurai which I must have bought when I was still playing D&D. I never got round to painting it back then and found it last year after I'd got back into gaming.

Painting this figure was fun. After gluing the figure onto a 32mm washer I added basing gunk and a couple of small rocks. Once the gunk was dry, the figure received two thin coats of Vallejo white polyurethane primer and after the 2nd had dried a thin wash of black paint was applied to the whole figure. When the wash had dried, I dry-brushed with off-white. the idea was for the black to provide deep shading and the off-white to provide natural highlighting under the thinned down paints I would be using. The sword blade and chain mail sleeves were undercoated with black.

The metals were done by dry-brushing successively with Gunmetal Grey, Oily Steel and Silver. The guard-piece was dry-brushed with Old Gold. Painting was done using thinned down paints, getting progressively lighter and thicker. Guessing that the other participants would probably go for riotous colour schemes for their samurai, I opted to do something a bit different and went for a rich dark brown for the trousers and a golden-brown for the jacket/vest. I reserved bright colours for the sword hilt and scabbards.

The base was mainly done by dry-brushing after an initial thinned coat of Flat Earth, using Iraqi Sand and various greys. The rocks started out black, with successively lighter shades of grey being used to highlight it.

Once painting was complete, the figure was sealed and shaded with my usual Klear/ink mix, then sprayed with matt varnish. I then used brush-on satin varnish on the cloth and hair, and gloss on the sword blade and scabbards to make them "pop".

After varnishing, the base was given a final dry-brush to tone down the effects of the Klear/ink coat, then tufts and flock were added.

Anyway, that's more than enough verbiage to have made you read on Boxing Day, so here's the eye candy:

I'll be back home on Thursday, and will have to crack on with my first batch of figures for the Challenge - the Croat light horse. I'm hoping to get them finished before I have to go back to work on the 3rd.