In preparation for our Ronin Showdown, the pious mountain philosophers have taken up arms to defend their mountain shrine against a band of rampaging bandits and other various unscrupulous characters, Usually I would be the one to run the bad guys in this scenario, but for some mystical reason it’s my turn to play the morally upright faction with these fine Test of Honor models.

We have had much discussion in our group over the years about getting into a Samurai style game. I was interested in the original rendition of Test of Honor but the models where a bit on the ‘rugged’ side of things and I passed. I had considered the bandit warband from North Star, but their lack of pants didn’t sit well with me (not so much a concern with Jeff it seems). With the relaunch of Test of Honor through GreyforNow games the product line has been fantastic, and I finally pulled the trigger on their Sohei warband.

Back when I was a young kid, I loved to play the original Samurai Showdown video game.  While I was honestly never that good at it, I always enjoyed playing as Wan Fu.  If you are familiar with the character, then you can see why I had an eye for these models. The quality of the models are great and the metal is a nice crisp quality with good detail work.  My only complaint was that most of the metal swords were bent into Shepard hooks.  I was on a limited time crunch to get these done in a hurry, so I also missed some mold lines in some areas.  

For the three monks I used the airbrush on the skin.  Being shirtless that knocked out almost half of the model right there.  My fanatics I did with the same skin colors but they where done by hand.  In hindsight I probably should have done all the skin with the airbrush at once but there was so little on the fanatics it seemed like a waste.  For the yellow I used the Averland Sunset as the base followed with a wash of Casandore Yellow.  Once dried I highlighted it up with Yriel Yellow.  I wanted to desaturate the yellow a little though for the extreme highlight so I used a 50/50 mix of Flash Gitz Yellow and Dorn Yellow. Dorn yellow is a very pale yellow and it helped take the electric edge off the Flash Gitz.  

I have a usual process for black that I’ve used in the past that works well but is a bit time consuming.  This time round I tried out AK Smoke Black for the base color.  What a fantastic Color!  First, it’s a super matte finish which I love in paints.  Second, it’s an extremely dark grey color but still has enough color in it to not darken out the details.  I painted some Nuln Oil into the deepest recesses and then hit some of the extreme highlights with a little of Model Color Dark Grey.  Traditional Samurai armor was usually lacquered up to a nice sheen, but I kept mine as matte as possible.  

The Lightbox really washed out the skin on the fanatics. It looks much better in person.

The orange color scheme was a mix of Vallejo colors that I thought would work.  For the base I used Vermillion, and then gave it a nice wash of GW Fuegan Orange.  Once dry it was highlighted with Orange Red and then a very water-downed extreme highlight of Light Orange.  The white I cheated and instead of using my long laborous process I went with contrast paints and some highlights.  It worked, but I am used to getting more of a warmer white that the cold white I ended up with just looks a bit off to me.   

I’ve been picking up a lot of different foliage types to play around with and I was able to use some flowers to add some nice colors.  I usually use a variety of dead colors when I’m using grass tufts so this time round it was fun to add some vibrant colors.  The Ronin game gives you the option to build and arm your warband as you see fit although there are limits to how many firearms you can have in a Buntai.  Thankfully we will have just enough points in our game to allow me to bring in one nice-looking Teppo.

In just a few weeks I was able to get this team together and I have some remaining models to paint if I wish to add to them or if I make the plunge into Test of Honor.  Unfortunately, there are a ton of other great looking models from GreyforNow and I already seem to have a pile of Warring Clans models that showed up at my house.  Hopefully soon you all will get to see some great shots of these monks beating up Jeff’s (pant-less) bandits in his beautiful terrain.  

The unfinished forces