Nipponpalooza part 1 (2021 week 5)

This week's theme is "paint all the feudal Japanese troops I have" which are basically Test of Honor sprues I bought a year and a half ago during what I assume was a Black Friday sale.  I have four sets of these totaling 27 figures split among mounted, ranged, and infantry and yes, horses count as a fig.  So for this exercise we're going to try to speed it up a lot by carefully picking the colors, carefully picking the details to focus on, and not very carefully using the airbrush to hopefully complete the batch in a couple weeks.  These will not be high quality paint jobs and will not include a bunch of detail work.  

These guys were a pain in the butt to build.  They have a lot of bejangles many of which I didn't mess with.  I also had a lot of trouble with their spears and I'm pretty sure the no dachi I equipped them with wasn't the bladed one I was supposed to use but I couldn't get them into their dang hands.  The blue guy with the blowgun even has two right arms which I didn't notice before I had him mostly painted.  I did get most of the mold lines, so points for that.

These are basically all of the normal troops in blue, red, green, and purple fifteen in total.  This was an exercise of pretending to use my airbrush productively for more than priming and shading but then still having to clean up most of that work with a brush.  I'm looking for an excuse a justification to buy a fancier airbrush but I don't think this was a good step in that direction.  On top of the typical prime + dark shadows from below + warm light from the top zenithal, these were also washed in Vallejo Dark Grey Wash and drybrushed badly to bring out more of the details.  The next step was to hit them with inks or Pro Acryl transparents as a thin-ish glaze to give them enough color to move forward with minimal details and brush work.  This almost worked.

The blue and purple were shadowed with Vallejo Game Air Mahogany, a really nice red brown, and the red and green ones were shadowed with a Daler Rowney Indigo Ink which is way more convenient than mixing Vallejo Game Ink black and blue that I've been doing previously.  This worked fine for everything but the red which was weak and turned those figures a really funky magenta.  I mostly fixed this with a brush mixing Pro Acryl Transparent Red and Transparent Yellow and some Vallejo Air Skin Tone which I use pretty much all the time now as a universal highlight color.  

Details were called out with brush work with special attention to the dark colors that weren't supposed to be the fig's primary color.  After that, most things were hit with a wash and in some cases, metallics and final highlights.  I considered breaking one of my rules since these guys have such small and inconvenient to reach eyes but ultimately I caved and painted them anyway.  They look better as a result but it added a couple hours to the total painting time.  The fifteen here were done as a batch with the guys from next week (six riders and six horses).  Including assembly, they ran at around 25 hours which seems reasonable given the not-spectacular results I got.  

2021 finished mini counter:  44/100