I don’t know if this is true, but the idea is that if you take your sword out and don’t draw blood you have to shed a bit of your own. Of course that may be just to stop lots of heavily armed people with incredibly sharp weapons waving them about willy-nilly. But there's this whole thing about blood shed in the Samurai tradition.
Yeah.
So here is the thing.
The latest shiny. The new project.
Samurai. Little ones. Lots of little ones.
I have a long history of modelling samurai, from 28mm ones to 15mm ones that were so beautiful that I had to do a whole zen thing, get myself really calm and relaxed, get my head really straight if I was going to paint them.
Note the sculpted ropework edge to the bases!
It never worked, I always freaked out when I picked them up and in the end settled for a dry-brush technique that always felt like a bit of a cop-out.
I even did 6mm blocks of samurai - that army completely destroyed a 6mm Zulu army that someone threw against them. The zulus were literally wall to wall (table edge to table edge) induna of semi naked warriors armed with sharp, short spears and hide shields and a tiny Japanese army armed to the teeth in head to toe, lacquered army. I don’t think any of my guys even broke into a sweat.
So, when I saw the new 10mm plastic samurai and ashigaru sprues from Wargames Atlantic, it was a must have. They looked good, nicely modelled and sculpted, and not as small as the 6mm jobs which were basically just blobs with sashimono. I bought a single frame off e-bay and liked what I saw. They paint easily enough – especially as I’m having problems with my eyes again, but more of that later.
The basic sprue
And some of the proposed command figures
So the plan - Project XA1, which was about the most manga plan name I could think of - is to buy enough for two forces, (a box of the samurai was ordered) so I can play against my friend using Lion Rampant (the historical version of Dragon Rampant).
The next thing - obviously - is to make some scenery. I've got some woodland that I made up for other small scale games, however I would need some houses, and things.
And that’s where we get to the shedding of blood.
Now, Pendraken do some nice 10mm samurai buildings
https://www.pendraken.co.uk/10mm-scenery-feudal-japan
but they weren’t in stock, so I tried building some of my own.
I made some carcases using mounting board, to make a box, with a gap of 15mm between the floor and the soffit of the roof. The plan was then to make them look rustic, by adding siding made from cocktail sticks, matchsticks, and coffee stirrers, cut to size and glued it.
I’m probably going to make a local land-owner or lord’s house out of this one,
Fiddly, not accurate and a bit oversize.
I was cutting some coffee stirrers to size for the sheathing of the walls, using a pair of scissors, and in a momentary lapse of concentration – IF YOU ARE OF A NERVOUS DISPOSITION YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP THIS BIT – I had removed about a half-centimetre square of the fingerprints of the middle finger on my left hand.
Doesn’t sound very much, does it? It was messy, really messy – mainly because of blood thinners. I had to go the local walk-in centre to get it dressed. Now I generally consider myself to be a safe model maker, I don’t do stuff like this. I can’t even remember that last time I cut myself so badly. I can only think that it was the oni (spirits) that live around the village that I’m making that demanded a blood sacrifice.
It must have worked because the Pendraken houses came back into stock and I was able to buy some of those.
Anyway new plan – both for personal safety and to increase productivity. Cut strips of mounting board, layout the walls, using the same stirrers and cocktail sticks but instead of trimming them down and gluing them in place, I just glued them down and trimmed them to size once they were secured in place.
So the test pieces worked well, reasonably quick to do, and simple process.
But still too big in terms of floor plan – especially when compared with the 10mm scale Pendraken ones.
So now I am weighing up splashing out for more of the Pendraken buildings or continue making my own. The ones I have started can all be used as an onsen, or as a temple, or a merchant’s, but I do need more peasant dwellings. The thing is that I can scale the size better now I’ve got something to compare them against – not copy them s such but use them as inspiration.
Anyway that's where I am at the moment on this, thanks for looking in.
