Samurai painting tutorial – by Steel Fist

Samurai painting tutorial – by Steel Fist

I am reposting a painting tutorial by Steel Fist Miniatures posted on the leadadventure forum to share with you all:

I have been meaning to write a series of articles on how I paint samurai to replace the tutorial that was on my blog, and as the blog is not working well I thought I would put it here.

I will be painting a series of figures going into all my techniques and explaining how to paint the relevant parts, so please don’t expect each tutorial to be comprehensive as I will be adding other tutorials to this thread.
Of course I’m not saying my method is best but as I designed the figures I hope people find my tips helpful.

So I’m going to start with

RED ARMOUR.

The figure is prepped and primed with red car primer as it provides a good base for my method, if your going to paint lots of red samurai I recommend buying some.

Once dry paint in your ground colours with as much neatness as possible, for the horse I have opted for black.

Also at this point I also put the shade on the red armour, my method for this is to use GW black wash on the armour as it will go into all the recesses and give the deepest shade, this way the base red becomes the middle colour. It is a very effective way of shading high detail figures like samurai.

I have also put the base colours for the metal and put bright red on the horse furniture as I’m going for a full red scheme on this figure.

The next step is to highlight the armour I use scarlet as it is a thin paint that shows some translucency and gives the impression of laccur. To do this I leave some of the base red showing through but I build up the scarlet on the high points.

The next pictures shows the horses head

The red for the horse furniture now has a black wash and then I wait till its dry then I dry brush over with the red again.

The black on the horse is lightly highlighted withe grey to catch the definition of the muscles, I’m still learning this and it’s worth studying horse anatomy to understand it better.

Next I’m going to discuss the sword.

As you can see the handle needs some intricate work. For the blade I put a GW black wash over the metal the once dry I edge the blade with pure silver.
The gold on the figure is done by putting brown wash over dry gold then once the wash is dry highlighting the edges in bright gold.

Finally the finished figure, I could add a white highlight on the red but for now I’m happy with it.

Well I hope you liked it, when Steel Fist post anymore I will add them. If you have anything else you think we should share then please let us know.

Carabus