Sengoku Jidai Diorama

Back in early June i purchased a copy of the Ronin rulebook from Osprey's wargames division.  It's a ruleset for fighting skirmish battles between samurai, warrior monks, bandits and so on in feudal Japan.  After reading through the book it quickly dawned on me that nobody I knew would want to play the game with me, as a self-confessed Nipponophile this just wasn't acceptable.  To remedy this, I decided to build a little diorama set in the world of Ronin.  As always, it turned into a much bigger task than I had originally imagined, it absorbed about 2 months of my spare time and it taught me a lot of new techniques that I'd not tried before.

So here it is in all its glory:

This little project presented me with a lot of firsts; it was the first time i've made a tree (in this case, made from the roots of a felled oak tree), the first time i've made snow and icicles, the first time painting historical minis, and perhaps biggest hurdle of all- the first time I'd made a diorama.

I'm pretty pleased with how the whole thing turned out, and learned a lot of new skills to bring into my modelling in future.  Of course there are things that I would change in hindsight, but for a first diorama i'm chuffed.

The samurai themselves are converted Perry Miniatures samurai, the wall is from Oshiro Model Terrain with a few little alterations as are the sake containers and water butt (check them out, a brilliant little company run by a fantastic guy called James) the lantern and sign are built from pieces of wood veneer and the warriors' katana are cut from sheet brass to replace the original ones.

For the photos of the diorama I decided to place the whole thing on a snowy Ukiyo-e scene, The print, if anyone wants to know, is Meguro taikobashi Yūhi no oka, part of Ando Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo series.  Which incidentally, is one of my favourite books.