42mm Samurai: Red gunner

Here's the last figure from my latest batch of 42mm samurai, a teppo ashigaru for my red faction. He painted up much faster than I expected. The Reaper HD reds are pretty good at coverage, so I'll be sticking to those (along with my Vallejo red which has pretty good coverage, too, though is a touch thick.)

Another thing I noticed was the ease at basing all of these samurai. I love love love Proxie Model bases- the lack of a prominent lip allows for more real estate to play with. I think a good exercise for any painter/hobbyist would be to grab a blank base and add terrain to it, but do the base without a figure. It's a great way to learn new techniques without the potential for ruining a nice miniature.

You could do either a few smaller bases, trying something different on each one -- a rocky base, a grassy base, a flowery base). Or you could grab a larger base and try different combinations of multiple elements. My Japanese roadside shrine actually started off as one of these basing exercises.
And yes, I noticed the gunner on this post has a plain grass base; sometimes, less is more.

I think this will be the last of the armored samurai I buy; I prefer unarmored chambara action. As I mentioned earlier, I'll probably be selling my armored samurai, and as a complete set. It'll be more expensive that way, but the buyer will have enough figures to start playing right away. The price probably won't be cheap; most of these figures have some sort of conversion work (sculpting, reposing, added clothing or armor or sashimono), and all of them have new weapons I hand made on my little anvil.

And in case anyone is interested right away, the starting price will probably be about $400 for around 25 (42mm) figures (my Lord Kaage faction, my red faction and a few extra armored samurai for hire,) easily enough to play the new Ronin rules. I'll also throw in a couple small pieces of terrain. I'm only selling to U.S. buyers, because shipping internationally would just be too expensive.