This talk about Renaissance period games at the club is the perfect reason for me to get back to a project that has lingered far too long. A pretty large collection of 28mm samurai miniatures, bought for the purpose of playing playing Warhammer Fantasy more than a decade ago. Much of it got painted, but I never finished the army. Now it can be found in army transport foam trays, shoe boxes, and probably even in many of the cupboards around the house: A sad example of a disorganised, demoralised army indeed. Anyway, now that we are discussing the topic of Renaissance era games, I looked at what I would have to do to get this rabble whipped into fighting shape. First, I would have to touch up on the miniatures. The painted ones have been chipped and damaged from gaming, mediocre storage solutions and moving houses several times. Others are just half-painted, and the painting level is a bit uneven overall. They all need at least a few brush strokes. Secondly, I would probably have rebase them. Individual bases work for large battle games such as FoG, and you can count six individual bases as one FoG base. But it is just a drag to pull two hundred individual bases out of a box and deploy them, and a lot of the time it just looks better. Third, I would have to fill in the missing gaps in the army with either new miniatures or some of the unpainted lead mountains in the darker corners of my wardrobe. These all sound like reasonable things to do as a side project, so let's get started! I chose six ashigaru (light infantry) pikemen from Perry Miniatures, which were some of my very first miniatures I got way back. I realized that the painting varied a lot: some of them had more layers of highlights than others, some of them had gloss varnish on the plates, and some details were not picked out in the same way. So I went over them and covered up the chipped off parts, and gave them a more uniform painting scheme. I also gave them a new healthy coat of varnishes, both matte and gloss, with the gloss varnish only covering the laquered metal armour plates. After that it was just a matter of pulling them of their bases, and see how they would fit on a bigger group base. The steel pikes have a tendency to break off, so I drilled holes in the base to glue them into: Glossy indeed, but not too shabby. I plan to wait with the actual bases until I have a few units, so that I can get a nice uniform basing solution.
Six down, some 250 or so left to do. Yay! /Jonas
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The Renaissance BlogWhat started as a blog about Renaissance gaming in general quickly turned into a blog about samurai miniatures. Archives
March 2022
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