This is the start of a samurai and ashigaru force of Zvezda figures from their Samurai Battles board game. I’m planning on using these figures for skirmish wargaming (Ronin or Test of Honour) so I based them individually.
I want to paint two opposing forces from the battles of Kawanakajima, this is the start of the Uesugi force, a Takeda force will follow. The Zvezda Samurai Battles sets come with decals for the battle of Nagashino (Takeda and Nobunaga clans), so I searched online for the Uesugi emblem (called a mon in Japanese) and came across this awesome thread from 10 years ago that had tons of images of the mons used by the Uesugi vassals:
http://www.samurai-archives.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=52326&sid=2af90b2e8e368f80c12457ac224a4c1f
I decided to paint these figures as the army of the Uesugi general Matsumoto Kageshige as the simple two-tone back banner (sashimono) looks good and is easy to paint. I also borrowed the color scheme of the ashigaru used by the illustrator in the thread linked above.
Here are the three samurai; each figure is from a different Samurai Battles set (set 6404 Samurai Archers, set 6411 Samurai Commanders and set 6403 Samurai Naginata).
The larger sashimonos on these samurai are not from the Samurai Battles figure sets; these come from the Zvezda Samurai Infantry big-box set (8017). At some point I will add the Matsumoto symbol to these larger samurai sashimonos but I want to use printer decal paper for this as I’m not good at freehand.
This was my first time painting Asian skin. I usually paint skin using the P3 flesh tones but those paints have a pinkish hue so in this case I used Vallejo Model Color Dark Flesh as the base color.
Here are the yari ashigaru from set 6401. The figures from the Samurai Battles sets are large for 1/72, closer to true 25mm scale. These figures were digitally sculpted and are beautifully detailed.
Here are the teppo ashigaru from set 6402 Ashigaru with Arquebus. In the picture below the blue cords on the ashigaru armor stand out a bit more, I used P3 Cygnar Blue Base which is a medium blue but it is hard to see on the black armor.
Another shot of the teppo ashigaru with a better view of the back-banners (these are the sashimonos that come with the Samurai Battles sets).
Finally, here are the ashigaru archers from set 6414. All of the figures in these sets are multi-part plastic, but they go together easily and do not require plastic cement. It should be noted that the plastic is fairly hard but brittle in some places, thin parts such as the yari spears are easily broken.
That’s all for now. I’m really happy with the way these figures turned out, I need to add some figures to make a complete force and I want to paint an opposing force so more to come.
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