3DAlienWorlds BLOG

Painting the samurai outer gate building

This is going to be a general guide to choosing a paint scheme for the Temple Outer Gate, rather than a detailed how-to guide. If you're keen to see the details of how this building was painted up, please take a look at the blog about painting the temple walls - this building was completed using the same colour scheme and techniques!

£ When you're choosing a colour scheme for your gate building (and the rest of the temple walls), you traditionally have 2 options to choose from. The first is this fully-painted style, which was perhaps a little more common in urban settings, where more money might be available.

The wall panels tend to be white, with most of the wood painted this eyecatching orangey-red - used for structures in both Buddhism and Shinto religions. If you do an image search for inspiration, you'll see many of them have the ends of wooden beams painted in yellow. The fences around the nio deity statues, and the window bars, are often painted green.

£ Option 2 for your colour scheme is to leave the wood unpainted. This is more common at rural temples, although the one pictured above is actually in Tokyo. The wood tends to be very old, and often darkens with age where it's not so exposed to weather.

If you look at the roof of the building, you'll see it's bright green - which is quite unusual. It's certainly very eye-catching! The ends of beams also seem to be painted white, which looks good against the dark wood... but I'll admit I've never seen that before.

£ I chose to paint my gate building to match the rest of my walls, in light wood with plenty of weathering. I basecoated everything with spray rattlecans in sub-assemblies, as shown in the photo, to make it easier to get a paintbrush into all the nooks and crannies. The photo shows everything ready for washing. After washes, I drybrushed heavily, then glued it together and then finally added brown and green washes to age it.




£ The deity statues can be painted up in a variety of ways. The photo above shows the most gaudy style, where the whole statue is splashed with bright colours and gold leaf.

£ If the fully-painted style is too bright for you, why not try a half-painted approach? Here, only the gold and red really stand out as painted, with perhaps some facial details picked out for eyes and teeth.

£ This last version shows (I assume) a very old statue, where any paint has mostly faded away, and you're left with the wooden statue underneath. Most statues would be wood, of course, but a verdigris copped would also look fantastic, I think!

£ Here's a sneak peek on the colour scheme for my statues. I just chose to leave them as bare wood, with heavy drybrushing. You can also see the light grey drybrushing and green washes around the bases of the pillars, which help to give the old wood a sense of great age.

The outer gate building will be released tomorrow, so watch this space!

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