54mm Men at Arms Samurai with Naginata started

54mm Samurai

This week was the start of painting on my 54mm Samurai.  I had played around with some colour combos before so the first thing I did was to do a colour chart.  I had read about this from numerous sources and decided it was time for me to get serious and try one.  Normally I just write do the colours I’m using and make up the shade/highlight recipes on the fly.  Can be an issue when you forget what you did a month ago.

The principle of the colour chart is that you work out all your shading and highlighting before you start on the figure.  Then when you are painting you should compare back to your original colour chart to make sure you are staying on track.  This stops you from having one way to shade a colour at the start of the project and another when you end (never done that myself of course).

Colour chart

So for the thee main colours I highlighted up and shaded down in approx. five steps in each direction.  For the green I had multiple attempts to see what worked and what didn’t.  In the end I went for a mixture of olive green and blue as the shade and white as the highlight.  For the yellow I first tried an off white as the highlight but that made things too dull so I swapped to gloss white which worked much better.  I want the yellow highlights to really be eye popping.  For the purple I used my standard highlight colour of an old Ral Partha fluorescent magenta and shaded down with a dark red brown (VMC Hull Red).  The small dashes above the colours in the middle of the page are to show the base colour.

Due to there being so much colour on the figure (compared to my usual green and brown colour range) I blocked out all the major colour areas just to see of it all worked together.  I wanted to see if large areas of the yellow/green/purple meshed.  This was a wise idea as I found the breastplate that was going to be purple didn’t work at all.  So I dropped that down to the lowest shade of the purple (Hull Red) so the tonal match was still there.  The same for the lower groin armour piece.  That was changed to a dull brown as it was originally green.  So much colour was overwhelming so I needed to add in some neutral colour areas as a break between areas and used the brown for this.  Just need to work out the sword colours now.

I did start doing some real painting and managed to work on the very small face area.  Not much to work with as all you can see are the eyes and mouth.  Even the eyebrows are covered.  Going to need to lighten up the face guard quite a bit to pull the viewer up to the face and not get lost in the yellow forehead guard which will be the brightest point on the figure.