After finishing my Crusader army for now, I decided to turn my attention back to my Samurai collection. The new Bill Hooks Redux book is finally in production and is due to be published later this year. Although the text is all written for the Samurai version of Bill Hooks, there will no doubt be a need for some pictures to illustrate the rules, so I wanted to give Dan, the editor, plenty of options, should he decide to use my figures and scenery.
In addition, I had agreed to put on a Samurai Demo game at the Battlefront show in Middlesbrough, the date being 29th November. Rather than wait until the last minute, I thought it would be sensible to get everything done in advance and as well as having all the figures, I would upgrade and add to my scenery collection. As if these weren’t good enough reasons to turn my attention back to Samurai, I still had plenty of models in my lead pile that needed finishing. A good push would see these done once and for all!
I started with the scenery. I had three Rice grain stores that had been assembled. Two were the standard Sarissa Precision Models, one was a scratch built copy, built by my friend Pete Harris. They were originally built to be used in our Test of Honour games but had been languishing in a crate under my desk.
I really like the Sarissa buildings range. They are practical, easy to assemble and look great on a wargames table. Like all MDF kits, they can look a bit flat, so I tend to add a bit of detail to spruce them up a bit. For me. it’s a similar process to adding extra cheese and topping to a shop bought pizza! It looks better, tastes better and its finished to your personal preference. In the case on the rice stores, I initially just added some tiling to the roofs.
I then proceeded to paint them, using my standard recipe for wood. I started with Flat Brown, then dry brushed with successive coats of Earth Brown, Orange Brown and then Yellow Ochre. The roof’s were painted grey and highlighted accordingly with the top painted red. I then added a bit of weathering to the legs and the roof of one of the stores. I wasn’t quite content with the result, so I left the other two for now. Otherwise I was reasonably happy, although I felt that something wasn’t quite right. The stores looked as though they were disconnected from the wargames table. The answer came to me as I was working on the next building, the Watermill. They needed basing!
Having finished the Rice Stores, I turned my attention to the next kit, the Watermill. Another Sarissa Precision kit, it is straight forward to assemble and as long as you follow the instructions, there shouldn’t be any problems. I left the kit in three subassemblies to make painting and finishing easier. I also added some extra detail. The tiled roof being the most obvious but I also added some balsa lathes to the upper part of the mill to give it a bit more depth around the ‘plasterwork.
I primed the building with spray cans, using masking tape to protect the two different colours. Once the painting was finished – again a question of using dry bry techniques to bring out the detail, although I did take the time to paint the lines between the stones a lighter grey. As an aside, the MDF takes paint very well and the laser etched detail will not be covered by anything but the thickest of coats.
Once the painting was finished I based the building on a Sarissa Precision terrain tile. I am very much a fan of these tiles as they will interlock enabling you to build a village or simply add extra terrain next to your buildings should you wish to. Some how mounting the building on it’s own base seems to make the whole thing ‘sit’ better on the wargames table,
With the watermill completed, the next building on the workbench is the Elders house, again from Sarissa. I’ve just assembled it for now but will start to detail and paint it in the coming week.
The final picture shows the village coming together. No doubt I will add a few more buildings going forward – once the elders house is finished, I have a temple bell to build.
That’s it for now, I better get back to painting!
Happy Modelling!