It’s fairly self evident that I have been rather pre-occupied with painting Samurai troops for my collection. I am getting to the stage where I have built enough to satisfy my gaming requirements but still have a few painting goals to achieve before I can move onto the next big project – whatever that is!
I picked up a box of the Fireforge command set at the recent Hammerhead show. The purpose being that I would have a nice Daimyo to lead the Fireforge faction of my army and give it a focal point. The three mounted commanders would also provide leaders for my Samurai cavalry contingent, thus satisfying my OCD requirement that all my units would be led by Fireforge models.
As you can see, the Fireforge set allows you to make 14 models ( although, confusingly, only 13 are shown on the rear of the box. My priority was to build the figures on foot, starting with the Officers.I also had decided to build three of the Ashigaru as musicians to compliment the banner bearers and the final model as an ammunition bearer for my Teppo Ashigaru. Although these options are not shown on the box, they are shown on the Fireforge website. I suppose I shouldn’t moan, but I will! I do wish that manufacturers would include a bit more in the way of instructions with their models or at least give a bit more help on their websites. To be fair, Warlord and Perry are very good at this, Fireforge are definitely not.
As you can see, I managed to make the ammunition bearer with the arm attached to the wrong side! I only spotted this as I started to paint it. So unfortunately, he was relegated to the back of the work bench whilst I considered the best way to fix the error. Obviously, a arm removal and replacement is required but I may change his role from Teppo support to Yumi support!
Meanwhile, I continued to paint the rest of the figures. First up, the sitting command group. These are my favourite figures from the set. The Daimyo, looks particularly stern, sat on his chair! I went to town on the stitching for these models and also added a pattern to the Daimyos shirt. Painting circles that small can be difficult, I often end up with a spot! It is easy to correct any errors by placing a blob of the base colour in the middle of the spot to get a circle again!
The Ashigaru holding the parasol is a nice characterful model. I did consider painting some sort of design on the brollie but decided to take the easy option and go for plain red!
There are two other foot samurai in the set. These will be officers for my Samurai units. I actually quite like the one that I have finished in black, white and silver but confess that he looks better from a distance than close up!
Next up are the two banner men. The one with the black banner has a script that I copied from pinterest. I’ve no idea what it says! It could be something inspirational for the army but as my brush work isn’t the best, it could be closer to a shopping list! As for the Takeda banner, this also is entirely made up. I’m afraid that I can be a bit lazy when it comes to researching such things and to be truthful, the Takeka banners that I had seen, I didn’t like…As my armies tend to be fictional rather than an attempt to exactly recreate precisely an army at a specific battle, it doesn’t worry me too much. The Takeda mon are decals from Veni Vidi Vici.
I wanted some Ashigaru Musicians in my HQ set up and the drummer team was an obvious choice. I was pleased with the finish on the drum. I used a red tone ink over Vallejo burnt red to get a nice lacquered effect.
To go with the drummers, an Ashigaru blowing a Conch horn. He completes my contingent of musicians for now. The mon symbol on his hat is from the warlord set of decals.
And so with the foot figures now completed the next project is the mounted figures and another cavalry unit. However, I will take a short break from painting Samurai – all that lace is straining my eyes!
One final figure to make it off of the work bench was the lovely Giants in Miniature figure for Wargames Illustrated, Takeda Shingen. He will actually be another unit commander in my army, so a bit of a demotion for him!
That’s it for now. Happy modelling!