dombom wrote:Wow, I love your painting. You got a very interesting method of paiting these. Mixing up several colors to achieve in a kind of sprinkeled pattern to achieve the illusion of plenty details. Looks great. I should try something like this as well.
Thank you very much! I don't really know the formal method of what I do, I kind of work by instinct now, but shading, blending and going from darker to light is the foundation of how I paint. I'd love to see if you ever make some more models!
Konrad wrote:Very nice Korean troops.
Since I'm very interested in feudal Japan,
it's nice to see someone still taking on this
fascinating era of Asian history.
And what a research and amount of information.
I haven't written that in the fifteen years I've been a member of this great forum.
Very nicely done my friend.
Very grateful to hear this, I love this period too! It seems samurai warfare was mostly against other samurai, so having a new army for them to fight on the tabletop makes for an interesting visual match. Haha, I think I write too much, but I care about the history of the projects I start... but I write way too much.
Xantippos wrote:It looks very perfect! would never have said it was 3D printed. Was it very expensive?
That model of Korean artillery looks very interesting. The soldiers look a bit on the chunky side though.
Yeah it was a great sculpt. I think it was very cheap, around $2? stuff in Asia costs a lot less...
Taobao is pretty inaccessible to anyone outside of China though, which is a pain.
Yeah I don't think the Korean Smol miniatures sculpts are that great actually. They released the sculpts and the armoured troops are wildly inaccurate, but the unarmoured troops are usable. I'm just glad to have more sculpts I guess. I'm trying to source someone to 3D print these for me, which might or might not work out eventually haha.
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"
Your majesty... I still have twelve ships at my command." - Yi Sun-Shin, when asked to disband the Joseon navy in his command on the eve of confronting three hundred Japanese ships at the Battle of Myeongnyang,
Admiral Roaring Currents (2014).
"
To catch a tiger you need to corner it, distract it with dogs, immobilise it with an arrow and pierce through its neck with a spear. But I don't see any spears." - Yi Bang-won. "
Well you're wrong. To catch a tiger you first need to feed it some dogs and even humans. You need to fill it up before you catch it." Yi Bang-gan -
My Country the new Age (2019) episode 15.
"
Today we are hunting. Kill all the winged animals you see. I will kill the tiger." - Yi Bang-gan,
My Country the new Age (2019) episode 14.
Hello all, this will be the last unit in this army for the near-future, I have another project which I need to start (long story, real life reasons, but I shouldn't talk about it yet in case it all fails and doesn't play out). Like my Mauryan Indian and Celtic Britons army before that, this will have to join the list of still WIP projects, but which I all intend to finish and come back to. To round out my army, I wanted something visually distinct and formidable. So I chose freehand. Lots of freehand. It was very painful to finish.
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1/72 Joseon Dynasty Korean Righteous Army - The Band of Good Will
최규원 대 (崔奎遠隊) (Choi Kyu-won's squad - Korean and Hanja) are the frontline soldiers of the Joseon army. It falls to them to bear the brunt of the enemy charge, to hold even when surrounded by death and to push head-on into the swinging sabres and screaming. They are all, without exception, survivors. The weak, the unlucky and the cowardly are weeded out quickly by the trials of direct combat, leaving only those who are willing to walk into the exhausting, harrowing crush of the worst kind of war again and again.
There is only fury left. Red-blooded, searing hot vengeance, vengeance delivered at the point of a hwando, or the shaft of an arrow, by the arms and will of Korean's wronged sons. Only months ago, this reality had been unimaginable; life had been unbroken peace for two hundred years. Now the country has turned upside down. The cities are burning, smoke curdling the heavens with the blackness of burnt souls. The bodies of slaughtered citizenry are scattered in the open, forming oceans of horror that sear the memory, such is the scale of death that has been visited to Joseon.
Atrocity, treachery, trauma. The bastard Wae, the bastard bastards had come and killed so many, so many in the most vicious and ignominious fashion, bodies missing heads, heads missing noses and ears, corpses bisected horizontally, diagonally as if in sport, some mangled and twisted beyond human form, some trailing or patterned with red making the stories of their ending.
So what more is there other than vengeance? Everything else has ended. The country of Joseon had once been a paradise of learning and discourse. The publication of thousands upon thousands of treatises and books about agriculture, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and literature preserved and built upon past knowledge for the betterment of all people. With the development of Silhak; the pragmatic, virtuous, patriotic Confucian governance there rose a renaissance in Joseon’s economy and sciences. The people of Korea had built, carefully, a vision for the salvation of society with the dreams of a finer future based on creativity, reason and knowledge.
No longer. Such things have been torn away, and the shift is as extreme as day to night, as light to dark, the inverse of everything familiar as where there was colour, now there is only ash, where there were words now only blankness, no meaning to be discerned from the grey. What new tragedy lurks around the corner, they wonder. Who else? who else is slain? Who is even still alive? Everything has changed and the people of Joseon have to change to, if they are to survive.
The people of Korea are no warriors. How could they be? What reason was there for warriors? Two hundred years of peace, with only skirmishes with horse nomads and Wae pirates. The people of Korea are intellectuals, artists, scientists, farmers, monks, poets, bureaucrats; builders all. So what are these men and women that trudge around the ash, jumping at every sound, skulking and hiding in their former homes? They are hollowed out, like one of the tombs of the ancient kings, old and enduring but no longer containing anything alive and animated.
This is what the warriors of Japan have brought, with their savage war. The bastards. The sheer barbarism of the split feet, they are an enemy with whom the Joseon could never share the sky. So be it. Some citizens of Joseon have committed suicide, having lost the will to live after losing everything. Choi Kyu-won has not given into despair. He has chosen instead to fight. This was a measured decision. He has purged his grief, even his anger. He has tried to forget the names and faces of his wife and children. The heart can only take so much. Perhaps it has given up on him. Perhaps it no longer exists. He thinks now, only of revenge. To do this, he has to think more clearly than ever before. He cannot be blinded by rage. Sadness is a crutch. He acts without feeling now, but faster, sharper and stronger than ever before. That is what the warriors of Japan have brought, with their savage war. They have destroyed his country and created something darker and more vicious in its place.
Kyu-won has a recurring dream. In it a tiger stalks the woodlands near his home. There are cacophonies of noises, somehow enhanced and sharpened to razor clarity; the mournful calls of birds, the snapping or twigs and ferns underfoot, the guttural, wet purr of some vast larynx. He has consulted shamans as to its meaning but to no avail. He now believes the Japanese to be the tiger from his nightmares, brought to life. Kyu-won is no cheokhogapsa, he has never hunted tigers as a profession. But like the people of Joseon, he has been thrown into a new dreadful world and he will have to learn quickly, or die. The tiger is stronger and larger. But the Joseon people have killed tigers before.
Kyu-won leads a unit of pengbaesu, the shield-bearing frontline warriors. Their equipment is sword, axe, mace and shield, their armour is chainmail, lamellar, plate and mail and the occasional brigandine. His warriors are mostly stocky brutes, walls of men, rough and loutish, able to bear the trauma of close war. In the Band of Good Will, his soldiers operate in concert with pole-weapon soldiers behind as is the tradition of Joseon battle formations. These former soldiers hail from the Left Guard army from Gyeongsang province and fate and circumstance have brought them into this righteous army, but former comrades work best with each other, so the soldiers of the Left Guard continue to fight together. The formation acts and fights as one entity with Kyu-won bearing overall command. He is not the biggest man of the unit, not the strongest, nor the tallest. But all defer to him regardless. The measure of him is within him and all can see it, as clearly as he sees the tiger of his nightmares.
Now they fight once more. They fight not to reclaim anything, for it is all lost, only to repay the ruin wrought upon them. They fight for vengeance. They fight for hatred and fury and anguish. Fight on. Fight and grunt and turn and kill and spit and strike and scream and to the end and death.
(최규원 대 (崔奎遠隊) form the fourth unit in my righteous army and round out the core of my Joseon army, the core being my first four units which I conceptualise as the basis of the broader army. For my fourth unit I wanted to explore some core unit concepts of the Joseon army, and the pengbaesu are very important for the early Joseon army. The pengbaesu also visually fit the Korean identity; their blue dragon shields invoke the imagery of blue Joseon dragons which is so iconic of Korea even today. Their chainmail and plate and mail were a chance to explore new armour types. I have my first chainmail armoured trooper in the army in this unit, with the first 'bowl' type helmet on the same sculpt. I wanted an infantry unit that embodied the Joseon army but which was also visually intimidating, something to square up to the professional troops of the invading Japanese. The pengbaesu and their polearm support worked perfectly.
The concept of this unit is based on the real battle formation of the early Joseon army - a standard order of battle was to have pengbaesu in the front, chongtong gunners following them, spearmen behind them, long swordsmen armed with a long single-edged sword each behind them to intercept enemies, and archers in the rear (or swordsmen and archer ranks swapped). This order of battle can change, with elements omitted according to circumstances. I didn't want to have a mix of ranged and melee in this unit as the
Basic Impetus rules system cannot account for this so I kept the spirit of the formation by moving the spearmen up. As such, the second rank of this unit is equipped with polearms; spears, halberds and tridents. Tridents in particular are iconic to the Joseon Koreans, so it was good to represent them here in this unit.
This unit is the most conversion-heavy so far. The front rankers on the side are armoured in scale brigandine and brigandine - so could be interpreted to be members of the elite gapsa, which fought on the flanks of armies. They could also just represent well-armoured pengbaesu. As such, I thought the reference to the flank-fighting gapsa was a nice touch to embody the spirit of Joseon formations. These models come from
Black Watch Miniatures https://www.black-watch-miniatures.de/, and used to be purchasable from
Hagen Miniatures https://www.hagen-miniatures.de/. I dislike working with metal models, but the number of Joseon sculpts are limited. The centre-left front ranker is a conversion from a
HaT El Cid Andalusian Infantry figure with a
Red Box Chinese light cavalry head. The centre-right front ranker is a
Red Box Korean Heavy Cavalry sculpt with reworked legs and robes in greenstuff. I gave him greenstuff chainmail sleeves and drilled out the weapon to give him a new one from the
Wolf of War Taobao store. The shields are from the
HaT Carthaginian Command and Cavalry set except for the left-most shield which is from the
Wolf of War Taobao store (which is the only shield with sculpted details - a nice break from all the freehand.) The second-rankers are either
Red Box Chinese infantry or
Red Box Korean Infantry, which have been modified with greenstuff breastplates. I wanted to do this both to match my visual reference of the short film:
A Symbol of Enthusiasm by the Jinju National museum but also to make these soldiers seem more professional and intimidating - I wanted a unit that could stand head-on against their samurai foes. The armour is eomshimgap - cotton, paper or leather armour. The helmeted trooper in the back has a head taken from the
Red Box Korean Heavy Infantry set with the top spike removed and fixed with green stuff. Some of the models have green stuff beards to keep in the theme with bearded Koreans in the broader army.
When painting this unit, the first rankers were inspired by images of pengbaesu online, with the leader in plate and mail inspired by royal guards found in Seoul today. The shield designs are all inspired by real examples and the freehand painting took a very, very long time. I made sure to work in Joseon blue in each shield to adhere to the broader armour colour palette. Joseon dragons are an iconic Joseon symbol, so this unit feels to embody Joseon cultural imagery very well. The leader has a grey and white trim on his armour which references one of two royal guard plate and mail uniforms in use today, with the other design being used for my cavalry unit. The tunic for my chainmail front-ranker references colours used in pengbaesu art. The dark metal colours of scale armour used in my right-most front ranker draws inspiration from dark coloured scale armour used in modern recreations. The last front ranker is the first model in the army to wear orange brigandine, which I changed from red after the basecoat as I realised there were already two 'reddish' tones in the front ranks. This gave me an opportunity to branch out and explore some more esoteric colours. Regardless, the blue on the shields and the red of the robes and helmet plumes matches the rest of the army.
The colour tones and sculpts of the back-rankers are directly inspired by the short film:
A Symbol of Enthusiasm: https://jinju.museum.go.kr/kor/html/sub03/03040103.html
The colour schemes took a while to formulate, but I eventually managed to produce something similar. I wondered if the uniforms would clash with the broad white colour palette used by the other infantry units, but I think the earthly colours of this unit don't stand out and so blend to an extent with the other units. The red hat and helmet plumes visually tie in with all the other units as well, so there is a link there, and fits in with the red colour imagery theme of the army. The armoured halberd trooper has a redder breastplate, as fitting in with the visual reference from the short film. Three of the eight models have beards in this unit - in keeping with the bearded theme.
The positioning of the troopers is close as per the other bases to show their spirit of camaraderie and aligned to look outward on the sides, as if they are fighting back-to-back against a numerically superior foe. The benefits of diorama bases are to allow you to tell a story by posing and positioning as well as create stories, which can be extreme conversions or small, simple choices. In this case, I kept it simple.
The base has a raised Styrofoam hill and adheres to the ideas and concepts already explained for the other infantry bases. My current soil painting recipe is: Scorched brown - bestial brown - tallarn sand + codex grey - tallarn sand - bleached bone. Mud and dirt is painted on the troopers' legs to evidence their worn nature and dire straits, and to tie this unit visually in with the broader army.)
(unit 4 of 10 - 이광수의 대 (李光洙隊) - Joseon Dynasty Korean Righteous Army - The Band of Good Will - Basic Impetus)
And since this will be the last unit entry post in a while, here is a shot of the whole army:
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