Bash Models

Within the Bamboo Forest

90mm White Metal kit from Classicae Miniatures

Article in Military Modelling Magazine 2007

History.

Whilst there’s a great deal of interest in Samurai subjects, their poorer counter-part – the Ronin – haven’t had as heavy a coverage.

Any Samurai could end up as a Ronin, partly through the defeat and dishonour of his master, possibly through his own fault – if he had performed a task badly, or was cowardly and then disowned by his master.

In any of the above circumstances, a Samurai had a choice, the ritual suicide known as Seppuku ( or in it’s more vulgar term, Hiri Kiri ) – which was the act of disembowelling oneself with a short knife, and a very painful way to go – or alternatively to become a Ronin – the dishonoured warrior, forced to wander with no home, no income apart from either stealing or performing guard duties ( if anyone would trust a man who was dishonoured ), or to try and make a living off the land.

Life was naturally very hard for these men, and in all probability living to old age was not going to be an option. As a Ronin you were beneath even the peasants who worked on the land, and could be killed out of hand by anyone who could catch you.

In fairness, the peasants themselves were probably less enamoured of their masters for the treatment dished out to them, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Ronin occasionally found help or at least food and shelter in some outlying villages.

The really bad part of becoming a Ronin was that there was very little chance of redemption; once dishonoured, you had little ( if any ) chance of regaining the position of a Samurai.

I’m never quite sure how to view these warriors. Their training must have made them extremely dangerous adversaries to the common man; and certainly as single robbers, or gathered into small bands, they must have been quite a force to be reckoned with.

Balancing that with the upbringing they must have had, falling on hard times and having to scrape a living cannot have sat easily with them – how many I wonder took their own lives at a later date, because they could not countenance what they had become ?

The figure.

I suppose I should recount how I first came into contact with this figure - quite some time ago too.

Roy Hunt, the sculptor of the piece, had it with him at Euro Militaire 2005, and being the open chap that he is, was asking what people thought about it. He was actually letting people handle the master sculpture – a brave man indeed !

When I got the chance to have a look at it, I said that he needed to make a kit out of it – I’d have one, so he had sales already !

Roy took a little convincing, and it probably took several people saying the same things as I’d done, but he did eventually produce a limited number of kits in resin; and good to my word, I bought one off him……And I painted it too, the finished piece being very pleasing.

The box art and components for this kit are shown in pictures #1, #2 and #3. The third shot being a close-up of the two different heads, and hopefully highlighting the differences between the two.

Photo #4 shows the hilt of the sword casting. This is a short run kit, so production isn’t as “high tech” as on kits from large firms, however whilst there are some areas of flash to clean up, it’s surprisingly restrained and very easy to make ready for painting.

The original piece I painted is shown here too, just in a couple of shots – pertinent I think because I made use of the “old man” head that comes with the kit and the alternative hat. Yes, I know, I’m getting ahead of myself, but see photos #5, #6 and #7.

Late in 2007 the company Classicae were formed, and they’ve picked several good kits - mainly from U.K. sculptors - to produce. Roy’s Ronin is one such, and although a lot of the model is the same as the short run he produced, there are a couple of additions that have been made or changed for what is obviously going to be a larger production run.

Originally the kit was produced in resin, with a couple of the more delicate parts cast in White Metal. The new Classicae kit is all in White Metal – that’s one change.

Roy included a couple of options with the kit he produced – on the figure’s back there can be either the long No-Dachi Sword with a pair of sandals strapped to it, or alternatively, there’s a bundle of straw or rushes that the Ronin would use as a sleeping mat.

Secondly, there was a choice of two heads – a young version and an older, more wrinkled face, again, either of these parts slotting into the location at the base of the neck.

Both these options are retained with the new kit, but additionally there are two different wicker hats that are being held in the left hand.

So there’s quite a choice – certainly a lot more than most kits offer, and that’s before you even consider personalising the kit with things you add yourself.

The Parts.

I think it unfair of me to compare the two offerings any further – the resin version isn’t available any longer, and to be honest, the quality of both pieces is on a par. The difference in weight with the new kit will please some, although that comes with there having to be a price rise, because over the past twelve months the price of metal for casting has risen by quite a substantial amount.

The metal parts are well produced, there is some flash on the smaller, thinner castings – probably most notable on the No-Dachi sword ( see photo #4 shown again here ) - but the excess material is easily cleaned off with a file or a scalpel blade, and I’d rather have that than a malformed component.

I have to say here that it’s the trousers that have me in awe on this kit. They caught my imagination when I saw the original Magic Sculpt parts that Roy had made, and the components haven’t lost anything as they went through the mould making and casting process. There is a mould line up the side of the legs, and whilst relatively fine, because of the wealth of detail on the trousers some might find it difficult to find a way to clean it off. The best advice I can offer is to search out a curved file with a rounded profile ( I think they’re called riffler files ), and a fine one of these really does allow you to gain access to even the most difficult of recesses.

This wealth of detail in the folds on the trousers is a painters dream really, because as I see it, they can be rendered using the simplest of techniques – gentle drybrushing and washes, repeatedly applied to build up the effect gradually; or carefully painted by a master with gradual changes from highlight to shadow, playing with the colours as the clothing travels down the figure.

I’ll not dwell too much on the painting of this piece; it really does follow a lot of what I usually do, so that I’d be repeating myself ( and bore you ) with the cut and thrust of it all.

However, it is probably worth noting why I chose certain colours, both on this later model, and what I learned from having painted the original resin kit, the former being affected greatly by what I’d done on the latter.

Looking at pictures of the original piece, I was always pleased with the model and how it looked, but because of the colour choices, it did blend in to the background that I’d added to the base ( probably a good thing for a man who was either hunted or living off his wits and basically pouncing of people or animals for his livelihood ); but essentially the choices were perhaps less than interesting.

Well, to be honest, the whole colour scheme was apt to let a judge’s eye slip right over him to the next model in line.

Not that I paint to please judges, but if they pass it over, then it’s going to have a similar effect in the model cabinet – i.e. not interesting to hold the gaze of the observer.

So, whilst muted, washed-out colours might well be the order of the day, something a little more eye-catching might work too.

Also, I’d spend a long time adding a very fine pattern to the trousers of the original figure. So fine that the pattern is hard to follow, it’s muted colours again blending in with the surrounding colours, and basically a lot of hard work done for no real gain – so no patterns this time either; he’s poor for pity’s sake !

I still wanted the rural / backcountry look to the groundwork though, but instead of using a fern based tree, I thought that some bamboo might be more appropriate. How I was going to pull that off was another thing – something to worry about later………Oh how I’d regret that one, let me tell you !

So, different colours - something eye-catching, and no patterns. Easy…..or perhaps not.

Strangely I began with the trousers. I know, I keep doing this and saying “I always begin with the face”, but honestly, the trousers were the first bit I tackled - possibly because I liked painting the original’s trousers so much; but hey, who cares.

I began by using a new set of colours to me – Games Workshop’s Foundation Colours, now unfortunately discontinued. The theory is that you can paint them on to whatever colour you like, and the pigment is so dense that they actually only need a couple of coats to cover an area.

Now to be honest, it’s the bane of most painters lives, trying to get a decent and solid red or even yellow on top of a dark colour that’s crept over from another area of the model; but believe me when I say “These paints work”.

I don’t think it’s necessary to rush off and buy the full set, you’ve probably got acrylic blues and greens that cover just fine, but certainly the Iyanden Darksun ( a sand colour ), Foundation Flesh ( self explanatory really, it’s a flesh tone ), and Mechrite Red ( a rusty red colour ) are all worth getting hold of. They’re all acrylic based, and should mix in with any other acrylics. Certainly I’ve experienced no problem with mixing them with the other ( some quite ancient ) Games Workshop paints that I have.

The trousers here are based around an undercoat colour I mixed from Skull White and Mechrite Red, the oil colours that go over them being mixed from Carmine, Oxide of Chromium ( a green ) and Titanium White.

Many happy hours can be spent - as mentioned - on these trousers. Once I started with the oils, I think I spent around six hours getting the basic shadows and highlights worked around the mid-tones, then went back once dry and fiddled about with some extreme highlights and some deeper shadow areas. Bearing in mind the face took about an hour ( shown in photo #8 ); six hours is a long time to spend on an area like this. But it was fun, and I liked the end result – see photo #9

The shirt is painted with acrylics – yes, I’m perfectly at home with those thank you, have been since the back end of the ‘80s, and they’re becoming my staple for light colours – the oils just seem to leave too many brush marks for my liking on pale colours.

Acrylics take some getting used to – and although the lighting has blasted out the subtleties of the shirt, there is a lot of contrast in there, working from pure white ( Skull White ) on the highlights, down through a mix of the white and Iyanden Darksun for the mid-tones, to adding some small amounts of Chaos Black to that for the deeper shadows. The results of the above being shown in photo #10

Whilst the original sword hilt is pleasing enough to paint, I wanted to make a little difference to this kit – yes, I was using the young head, and a different hat, but forgive an old modeller his foibles.

So I decided to change the sword hilt and the tassel that is moulded in place on the hilt.

It’s not a big change, I know, but it’s enough I think. The sword hilt is actually a cheat, because I used one from a Verlinden Samurai that had some parts missing ( thanks to Lynn Sangster for sending me a box of “useful bits” some time ago, this part was in amongst them, and seen next to the original component in photo #11 ).

It saved a lot of effort, having me only cut a section out of the centre where there was an ornamental metal section, and then shorten the hilt so that it matched the original for length. I then set about constructing some tassels – the easiest way being to add a blob of superglue to the sharp tip of a cocktail stick, then add a small blob of Magic Sculpt to that, and use a sharp scalpel blade to form the strands of the tassel. The upper binding being added after, and the tassel being cut from the cocktail stick ( with part of the wood tip still inside the tassel – thus adding solidity ) and drilling a fine hole in the top to accept the hanger.

The hanger by the way is some very soft lead wire ( three strands ) that have been plaited together, cut to length and added to the tassels. Fine and fiddly work, but it adds a bit of a difference to the kit as a whole.

I’m a bit of a coward when it comes to hacking bits off a kit because I’m going to reconstruct something slightly different, so I make a point of producing the “new” addition before actually taking anything off the original piece. That way if I make a cock-up, I can bin the “superbly sculpted alternative” and pretend nothing happened at all, and that I preferred the original all along……….O.K., look, it’s better than hacking something off and then being in a mess because the conversion didn’t work.

So that’s what’s shown in photo #12,

and in photos #13, #14 and #15 the model is really coming together.

Now, that bamboo forest………

I’d been mulling this over for some time, and I’d had a bit of inspiration in a dentists surgery waiting room – well, I’ll think of anything in there barring the impending quiet chap and his undersized but very effective Black and Decker !

There was an artificial plant in the corner, which whilst looking very plastic, did use wire and silk to form the leaves.

O.K. silk might be a little too hard to press into service here, but what about thin notepaper, and some thin gauge wire.

Might be worth a try.

I cut out several diminutive leaf shapes – basically a double pointed sword shape that mimics the shape of a bamboo leaf in miniature. I used superglue to fasten some thin wire ( stripped out of an old length of household electrical flex ) and left them to dry.

Painted up with acrylics ( Chaos Black, goblin Green, Iyanden Darksun and Skull White – making different mixes of these once I began painting in batches, more of that later ), the initial tries looked promising.

But how to mass-produce them. Well that was simple really. I used several layers of paper ( six is about the most you can get an accurate cut through with a sharp scalpel ), and by cutting a wavy line down the length of the paper, then cutting “Cs” so that the leaf shapes form as part of the wavy line ( think of some elongated figure eights all joined together and you get the idea, the leaves forming out of the elongated loops that the figure eights make ( see photo #16 ).

In this shot I’ve made the initial wavy line thicker so that you can see it more easily on the left of the shot, the leaves being made by the second line being cut, as on the right.

Photo #17 shows the main vein of each leaf being added; as mentioned thin wire stripped from electrical flex, and cut, in this case to about 25mm lengths, then glued onto the leaf. It’s tedious, and you must add the wire to almost the whole length of the leaf.

In the beginning, I made the first few leaves with the wire going only half way up, and the paper parted company with the leaf, or the tip of the wire poked through the paper when I came to put a bend in the leaf to make it look more realistic.

The brown square-ish thing is actually some backing paper from some double-sided tape. Superglue takes an age to dry on it, and it can be used as a little reservoir for a blob of the glue to be handy, instead of having to squeeze out a little bit every time you need it. Obviously be careful when using glue in this way, it’s apt to get all over the place, especially on clothing and possibly even on the cat, dog or small children.

Whilst initially that might seem amusing - the movement of such live objects being arrested for the time being - the impending anger of a sensitive partner soon outweighs any fun – so probably best to keep it out of reach then, eh ?

It’s no fun having your fore-arm fastened to the workbench either, so think on people !

Painting all those leaves. Well, again, it’s best to do them in batches; priming them with an acrylic paint thinned with Isopropyl Alcohol on the first coat so that the paint sticks to the wire, then adding whatever colour seem appropriate, and getting any detail – in this case a lined effect – onto the leaf.

In photo #18 I’ve fastened about 30 leaves to a wooden block ( makes them easier to hold ) using two sausages of Blu-tac. The first sausage is pressed onto the wood – in this case around two of the upper edges forming an “L” shape, and then the wire tips of each leaf pressed into the Blu-tac. This will hold them well enough I suppose, but I prefer adding a second sausage of Blu-tac over the top of the wires to get a better grip on the wires.

Painting a small batch like this allows one mix of paint to be made up with the Isopropyl Alcohol as a thinner, paint this on, then add more acrylic paint and water for subsequent coats. By the time you’ve coated the last leaf, the first one will be dry enough to receive the next coat of paint.

I started off with a dark mix, adding this to top and bottom of the leaf ( 2 coats ), then began working lighter and lighter paints into the initial ( but depleted ) pool of acrylic paint to coat the top of each leaf. I also added more water when necessary.

By doing this, the paint runs through a natural progression of dark to light, and I think I probably added about ten to twelve coats of paint to each leaf.

Hence, it’s much better to do them in batches.

The other advantage of course, is that each time you mix the paint for a batch of leaves, it’s unlikely to be the same colour exactly. I actually kept as many of the mixes on the palette as possible, so that I could consciously make the paints a slightly different colour.

Once the leaves of one batch have been completed, then I allowed them about five minutes to dry ( fortunately it was very warm weather, so this was enough ), and then transferred them into a box on one side of the bench.

By doing this, then rattling the box to mix the leaves up, when I came to the point of gluing the leaves onto plant stems, the variety of shades would enhance the natural look of the bamboo.

Ah, stems. I’ve got a plant growing in the back garden which I think is some kind of Cotoneaster ( a stiff fan shaped plant that tends to climb walls ). Back then my wife ( Frances ) however was convinced that it’s a weed, and had asked me repeatedly to kill it off.

The problem here is that:-

a) It’d be hard work – ugghhh !
b) I’d not be modelling, I’d be gardening.
c) I wouldn’t have a perfectly good source of tree trunks and in this case, bamboo stems.

So she’s not got a lot of chance of me getting the weedkiller out.

The Cotoneaster is popular with me because it grows woody stems that have leaves that grow opposite each other, rather than in a staggered / alternate arrangement up the stem. This makes the leaf nodes look very similar to bamboo.

Having harvested several twigs and stripped them of their leaves, I proceeded to look up reference for Bamboo on the net. I’ve kept bamboo plants – but that was in a garden a couple of house moves ago – so best to check.

What I’d forgotten is that most of the time the plant grows with green stems ( sometimes they go yellow if particularly old, and thus will possess a thick trunk ). There is a black-stemmed variety too, but I’m not sure if that is a cultivated strain, or perhaps from one particular area, so I stuck to the common stuff.

I painted several of the Cotoneaster stems with green oil paint, and added dark colours for the leaf nodes, and also risked a couple of yellow stems, just for variety. ( See the very dark shot in photo #19 ).

The final preparation was to paint about 50 leaves without wires glued to them. These would be used on the base as leaf-litter around the figure’s feet. Obviously the leaf-litter had to look dry, so the green was left out of the leaf colour mix.

The groundwork was made out of Milliput – textured as usual with a small stone - and the figure placed into position so that his feet sank into the putty a little, then once indentations had been made, removing him whilst the Milliput cured.

Whilst that was happening I made the bamboo plants up, using a sharp scalpel to make holes in the stems, and gluing between three and six leaves in to the node points on each side.

The first one I made is shown in photo #20, but I think the ones in #21 and #22 look better. Certainly as I got the knack for placing the leaves more realistically, which happened as I got more practice, the plants seemed to look more lifelike.

The beauty of this is that plants don’t grow “nicely” in the wild - there’s no-one there to prune them - and because there’s a lot of stems used here, they look more bushy and natural than perhaps they would when seen on their own.

Final words.

Of course I like this model. I can’t say that it was easy to paint, but to put that into context, it’s one of only three models that I’ve managed to paint for a second time.

It’s also the best of these attempts at returning to a piece, so on that alone I am mighty pleased.

As far as quality of the model and its sculpting go, well this I think is a model that can be painted by any level of modeller. As mentioned there’s plenty of options for drybrushing and washes, which will render a very pleasing figure, and for the more advanced painter, there’s lots of detail to spend time putting fine brushwork on to make the most of what the sculptor has put in front of you.

The canvas is broad too. Simple, single colours such as used here – perhaps hinting at a man who’s been out in the wilds for some time and has had only managed to replace clothing with basic materials – using the “old man” head will further this idea.

Alternatively, you could depict patterned materials, either in a grubby and dishevelled state, or perhaps relatively well kept and clean, along with the younger looking head, and portray a character who has only just fallen on hard times, but still retains his clothing and weaponry from that more respectable life.

I’ve chosen not to make the figure appear dirty. My reasons being that the bamboo is relatively green and fresh, thus it is spring or summer, and as the man here is relatively young, he is still clinging on to his morality and cleanliness.

Basically this is a model that whilst historical, allows such an open canvass that the painter can truly have a very free hand with what he or she chooses to depict.

I’d like to extend my thanks to Classicae models, not only for their supplying this kit for review, but their patience in me having taken such a long time to get the figure finished. Mind you, there’s about 400 or so leaves on the bamboo, so really, I’ve not made the job any easier.

Also in memory of Roy Hunt who sculpted this, along with many other figures and flats, some of which will feature here over time.

Roy passed away suddenly and is greatly missed by those of us lucky enough to have known him.

Rest in peace sir, your humour and laughter is missed more than you could ever have thought.