Way cool! 

Excellent work old chap!

Good stuff

Hi, my name is Bob, and I was reading your forum and saw your mine's, very good , very good indeed. I too am painting a Japanese  10 mm army as well.  If you don't mind if I ask a few questions ? I am working on a Japanese army in the Sengoku Jidai Period. The rules that I may be using are the Impetus rules. Have you heard about them ? If you have, are they a good set of rules?
     You said, I think... you said that the Ashigaru armour was black...? Were their clothing colors bright, or dull colors ? Do you know any good sites on painting or showing different color schemes on the clans. Do you think that the rules I'm going to be using are a good set of rules to use a Japanese army with ?  I'm sorry for all the questions, I get that way at times...sorry... I can't wait to see your next pictures of your armies...
Stay well,

Bob51451

Quote from: Bob51451 on 28 September 2021, 01:39:43 PM
Hi, my name is Bob, and I was reading your forum and saw your mine's, very good , very good indeed. I too am painting a Japanese  10 mm army as well.  If you don't mind if I ask a few questions ? I am working on a Japanese army in the Sengoku Jidai Period. The rules that I may be using are the Impetus rules. Have you heard about them ? If you have, are they a good set of rules?
     You said, I think... you said that the Ashigaru armour was black...? Were their clothing colors bright, or dull colors ? Do you know any good sites on painting or showing different color schemes on the clans. Do you think that the rules I'm going to be using are a good set of rules to use a Japanese army with ?  I'm sorry for all the questions, I get that way at times...sorry... I can't wait to see your next pictures of your armies...
Stay well,

Bob51451

Welcome! I have heard of Impetus but haven't played them myself. I understand they use single diorama style basing which I'm a big fan of and works well for Sengoku armies. There's a version of them (Baroque?) that fits the Sengoku period a bit better I suspect given the use of guns.

I'm actually working on my own set of rules to use for the era as I found Japanese warfare to be a bit different from a lot of warfare in the period and find it didn't quite fit with what a lot of the rules out there did.

Ashigaru armour was usually black or a dark brown as far as I can tell, but their clothes could be brighter colours. The main issue with the period (as with many periods) is that no one was really recording detailed information of what was actually going on and what soldiers actually looked like. Armour is usually an easier one to quantify as it survives for longer, whereas clothing fades and degrades, so it's difficult to say who exactly wore what. There was also a huge variance across regions. While it's likely that richer lords, particularly later in the period, could have fitted out their armies in spiffy matching colours, poorer ones would just have their peasants stick their armour over the top of whatever clothes they turned up in, which may be a lot more duller browns and greys with a few bits of colour here and there. Even with the banners used, the information on what they meant is lost to us, and there doesn't seem to have been any consistency from region to region either so while one lord may be using different colour banners to indicate levels of command, another might have been using different colours to indicate different groupings of soldiers and using stripes or other patterns to indicate levels of command. There's a lot of guess work! A lot of the information we do have is from the later Edo period where things were a lot more peaceful and organised and the writers were given to somewhat fanciful depictions of the preceding era, such as delicately configured battle formations with complex subunits of weapon-specific detachments (a near impossibility for a large feudal army to perform) as well as notions of "bushido" and "undying loyalty" that were completely contrary to the actual period accounts. So Edo period depictions on "uniformity" must be taken with a pinch of salt.

A lot of modern video games and the like will often give a clan a certain colour to make it easy to tell them apart in game, but a lot of the time that's largely arbitrary and in reality armies would have had an array of colours. For the SJ I plan to do a bunch of fairly generic units in a variety of colours (though maybe following certain colour themes similar to what I've done with the Early Feudal to make them easier to tell apart for game purposes) then some specific ones for the well known clans. Bear in mind clans were often interconnected and split out in many branches, so it wouldn't be unusual to see the symbols of an eastern clan fighting in an army in the far west as they happen to have a branch there that is sworn to a particular lord. The actual colours used could vary even with clans bearing the same symbol, or variations of the same.

So really it's mostly a case of a bit of imagination and common sense. One thing to note is the sashimono (back banners) were more often coordinated than the armour and uniforms. These were often white with a black kamon (symbol) but would sometimes be coloured with a white kamon, and other times be a mix of colours and patterns depending on what that particular lord wanted to represent. Probably the best inspiration is looking at the painted battle screens from the era and the colourful displays they present. There's a lot of good info here too: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/japanese_history/arms-and-armor-f35/?sid=b39a4288ce406ed7b65dffde2a046d90

At the end of the day, if you do something that looks good on the table and isn't too outside the realms of reality, you're probably going to have a nice looking army that's reasonably close to what it would look like. And if it's not, then it'll still be good fun to play! Hope you share some pictures of your armies, always good to see!

Great write up mmcv

When I have been putting together my Sengoku armies, the key thing I learnt was that colour wasn't a key differentiator. It was the symbol, the Mon, that was. And within a force these could be in different colours or on different coloured backgrounds. This does rather break with my expectations of military colours, but of course it is from the other side of the world, so cultural will have different expectations and norms.

And as mmcv notes - too much is inferred back from the Edo period, or is just presented as the Edo period items where always the case (this is not unlike the Victorian English view of history!)

Some sengoku era ashigaru, Shimazu clan:







Also been working on some new terrain pieces:



The trees are coming on well but the attempts at hedgerows tend to fall off the stick every time I try. Wondering if I should try superglue rather than PVA for the base layer.

Very nice. Love the Mon choice too

Another nice unit and the trees are coming along nicely.

Might even get away with some UHU for the hedgerows. Nice figs., by the way. 

Very nice work, Matthew ! 

Cheers - Phil.

Quote from: mmcv on 05 October 2021, 06:03:37 PM
The trees are coming on well but the attempts at hedgerows tend to fall off the stick every time I try. Wondering if I should try superglue rather than PVA for the base layer.

I wouldn't use superglue for that.  PVA ought to work - I've used it for hedgerows using plastic washing-up scourer pads glued to MDF.  You could try an impact adhesive like Evo-stick though UHU, as suggested already, should work too. 

Thanks!

For the hedges I'd painted a lolly pop stick, ran a line of thick PVA down it then stuck on various clumps. Then sprayed down with watered down PVA. I'm wondering if I didn't let the base PVA dry enough before applying the watered down PVA, or used too much watered down so it ended up soaking in and diluting the base layer making it all come apart again.

I stick mine on with Evostick contact adhesive and then when dry, cover with diluted pva to stiffen them up. I imagine the diluted pva did cause the original pva to go soft again in your case.

UHU workd on my fish tank foliage, mouting them on MDF. Let it set for a while, and you may need to prop the foliage in place initally.