Red Sand Blue Sky: painting the samurais

With the three of us we've bought two sets of samurais and we ended up with 4 models each. I started to paint the first one in the color theme: red and black with gold features.

This something completely different than painting fantasy figures. Also very refreshing in painting approach and I found out stuff that I can use for fantasy painting. For example the dragon on the back of the kimono pas simple and easy to do but gives a lot of character to the mode. Painting flesh is something that should look more human skinned and is a challenge. All in all I think the first steps in painting samurai came out nicely.
I decided to put them on a simple round base with simple sandy cover to keep it tight with the japanese garden terrain I made.

The next samurai has already some paint splashed on so I will give you the first work in progress picture as well. Again the same colors but now reversed. The other 2 samurai carry armor and more battle gear so they will be a lot different then these two, but that is for the next post!