I have pretty much finished the Samurai, apart from all of the white I have noticed in the photo. I also repainted some white in on the lizards.

To be honest these were a joy to paint, a whole lot longer to do than the Aztecs or Conquistadors but still really easy to do especially with the Contrast Paint. As with the two other armies I am going for speed over excellence. That is not to say that I am not trying, but there is no shading or highlighting as I want to see how I get on without all of the extra bits – lazy…possibly but I am getting armies done in weeks rather than months or potentially years – possibly not at all.

Take the Aztecs, I bought them in February and never touched them I gave them a go with Contrast paint and that was them done, I purchased more and got the new lot done in just over a week.

As for textured paint –

Now, as you all probably know, Contrast Paint is a high pigment thin paint. Tonight I achieved the next iteration of the range. I am calling it Contrast Plus. It is textured contrast paint…

the reason being this…

My daughter very kindly gave me some of her home economics baking. It was indeed very nice, sadly a piece fell off straight into my pot of yellow paint. I think I pretty much fished it all out…only time will tell.

Today I spent two hours filling in a form to tell the Scottish Government that I had 4 pupils in my school’s nursery class. One of the questions wanted me to give an age of a pupil that wasn’t accurate based on the date of birth. The child was three plus seven months, however according to the dates they gave on the form she was actually meant to be four. By the end I was doubting my own ability to add up.

So I phoned up the support person who said that I really should fill it in based on the dates they gave, if I had done then it would have been inaccurate. In the end I filled it in my way, poor bloke, I must have phoned him up a half dozen times, luckily he was an ex colleague who knows I wasn’t just being an arse. The rest of the day was sorting out a school Website as we don’t have one…. ahh the dizzy heights of school management!

A bit pooped tonight, so not much done.

I did however manage to get some paint onto the Samurai.

These are going to be as colourful as the Aztecs I reckon.

I was having a look at the HOTT lists and indeed, they have a Japanese Epic list. These are based on a legendary history, not to mention the films of Kurosawa.

Not exactly the most exciting list 😂….

Blades (Samurai)

Riders (mounted Samurai)

Shooters (err shooty Japanese types)

Hordes (Ashigsru or peasants) Personally I would have the Ashigaru as spears

Sneakers (Ninja – what else)

Lurkers (Ronin or Bandits)

I could fantasy-ise it by adding things like a Gashadokuro… basically a giant Skeleton who is made up of the bones of people who died of starvation or were unburied after a battle… not a nice chap, he bites the head of lone travellers and drinks their blood…

I could go for a unit if Oni = trolls or ogres (possibly demons), normally shown as being red.

Luckily Alternative Armies has a whole range of Japanese monsters in their Sengoku monster hunter range.

Thinking about it, and on a totally different note, I really should start printing and painting tanks for the Games Day in October!

I will make a start on them this weekend.