3d-printable terrain for all your samurai wargaming needs
Our new terrain set is released today... 8 fully-detailed Samurai Shops!
▲ These are the 3 shops I chose to paint up, from the 8 included in the set. Painting up all 8 would have taken quite a while - so please forgive my laziness!
▲ Here's a closer look at the 3 shops. Since the set is modular, with many, many different building styles, all three of these shops look quite different.
▲ Tea shops are usually decorated with bright red fabric covering the benches, and I also painted the paper lanterns, the large umbrella and the noren curtains in the same bright red.
I decided to use the solid version of the LED lantern sign (on the right of the photo), with the kanji characters for "tea shop".
▲ The musical instrument shop is probably the most luxurious of the 3 shops, with a tiled roof and a full-height second storey. The owner has also made large display windows at the front, with some traditional instruments to grab your attention. I will probably add some ornate grills over those display windows later, but I left them off for this photo.
This shop also has a large wooden sign over the doorway. These are often engraved with the name or type of shop and left as plain dark wood, but I decided to paint the kanji characters in gold to make it even fancier!
▲ The sake (ricewine) shop is a more functional design, and so I painted this building with more subdued grey panels. The blue and white sign makes it very obvious what they're selling, but they've also added extra signs and lanterns to the front posts, and several large barrels.
The town drunk is obviously a regular customer, sipping his sake in the sunshine.
▲ Let's take a look at the shop interiors.....
The sake shop has plenty of barrels and tubs, plus a few wooden cups and gourd bottles on the shelves and table.
▲ The musical instrument shop has a special tatami mat area for trying out the many koto and shamisen on display....
▲ .... plus even more instruments on the shelves and tables on the other side! The shallow boxes hold shakuhachi bamboo flutes, and those large picks for playing the koto.
▲ The tea shop has lots of seating inside, with another red cloth bench and a small shelf and firepit area.
▲ Tatami benches were very common in tea shops, too, and we have a second kettle and firepit on the other side.
▲ The second storey of the musical instrument shop has a full-height room, and I've decorated it with simple tatami mats and two windows. Let's hope no snipers use those big windows overlooking the main street, eh?
▲ The new Samurai Shop Set is available to download from today!
For this painting guide, I'm just going to show you the basics of how the buildings were painted up, and then I'm going to assault you with plenty of reference photos of real shop interiors!
Let's get started with the shop buildings....
▲ To save time, I spray undercoated all the buildings and accessories in just 3 colours - light brown for two of the shops, a medium brown for the music shop (just to make it slightly different), and a dark grey for the roof tile pieces.
▲ I followed up the undercoat sprays with heavy black washes for the wood and rooftile pieces. These models are designed with washes and drybrushing in mind, so you should get great results very quickly!
▲ The roof pieces were then carefully drybrushed with a light grey, just to bring out the edges of the tiles. I used a 3cm-wide brush for this process.
▲ The wood pieces were similarly drybrushed with a 3cm-wide brush in light brown, and then a second drybrush in light grey was done on the bottom few centimetres of any exterior walls. This works well to simulate weathering and sun-bleaching on the most exposed parts.
To complete the buildings, I then filled in the exterior panels between the wood beams with lightgrey and then white, or medium grey and then lightgrey. The interior walls were finished in sand colours, or muted green. You'll have to wait another day to see how those turned out!
Now it's time for some accessories....
▲ The RICE shop has this awesome rice-cleaning machine accessory. You throw the rice in the top hopper, and turn the handle to separate the rice from the dirt and dust. This is a real example, in lovely aged wood.
▲ The interior of the RICE shop also has this brilliant rice-pounding machine, in dark old wood. You can also see the rice bails behind it, and the tubs of rice in the bottom right corner.
▲ The UMBRELLA shop has these racks of folded paper umbrellas, as well as opened umbrellas for wall decorations. You could go crazy with beautiful ornate versions like those shown above....
▲ ... or choose more simple one-colour versions, like these.
▲ The TOY shop accessory set has a simplified version of this doll display shelf, which looks great outside in the display window box. If your eyes can manage it, try painting lots of garish colours on the emperor and empress dolls!
▲ Here are a few traditional wooden toys, such as the spinning tops, kaleidoscopes, and the stacked hit-with-a-hammer doll on the right.
▲ The shelf accessories also include these two toys - the fat daruma doll, and the nodding cow figure.
▲ This is just an illustration, but shows all the common elements of a TEA shop exterior. You can see the large paper umbrella, noren curtain, and cloth-covered benches. These are usually red, but go nuts with whatever colours you like!
▲ Here's an interior of a simple TEA shop. Tatami benches to sit on, and plenty of kettles, buckets and bowls.
▲ The POTTERY shop would not contain much white china, but would contain lots of earthy colours for the bowls, dishes and vases.
▲ Here's a CLOTH shop interior, with the shelves full of fabric rolls, and those lovely display racks which make a great canvas to show off your freehands!
▲ This is a koto, a traditional stringed instrument from the MUSIC shop accessory pack. Note the bridges which can be moved to create different sounds, and the pretty fabric wrap on the bottom end. 
▲ The other MUSIC shop accessories include various sizes of drum (usually black, red, or varnished wood), and the banjo-like shamisen. You'll notice that the shelf model has a few rows of the soundboxes, like in the photo above, over which (white or cream coloured) skin is stretched to complete the shamisen.
▲ We're on our last shop model now - the SAKE (ricewine) shop. The photo above shows the traditional stack of buckets and giant tub that you can display outside. It also has some gourd bottles hanging outside....
▲ ... which look like this. A resin printer will probably work very well to show off the rope tassles on the 3D model.
▲ Lastly, these big sake barrels are also included in the SAKE shop set, as singles and a stacked pile of 3. These are heavy tubs wrapped in rough matting and rope, with a decorative design on one side. The 3D model has a simple "sake" logo on one side, but if you want to try painting your own design, just turn them around and paint on the other side.
That's plenty of photos for today. The photos of the finished shops are coming very soon, when the shop set is finally released tomorrow!
We have a new UK retail partner to introduce to you today - Naraa Tools, from Leicestershire.
They're offering pretty much our entire samurai collection of terrain, plus a few gaming accessories such as the card boxes. Take a look and see what they have for you!
https://www.etsy.com/shop/NaraaTools
This came up in a recent game of Test of Honour - how to mark out the area around an objective, so that it's easier to see if enemy are in range to contest it. So today we have a little gaming aid to present to you..... Objective Rings!
▲ These model are a set of variously-sized marker ropes, themed to fit into any samurai game. Each ring is a 3d-printable double rope, with a decorative paper tassle placed at one point of the ring.
For anybody also interested in those treasure chest objectives, by the way, they are available for free on Thingiverse (author unknown, sorry!).
▲ There are 5 different sizes of objective ring included in the set:
Please note that the 8" and 6" diameter circles will require larger print beds, to print in one piece.
The Objective Rings are available for download from today!
Lots and LOTS of photos to show you today, with assembled pics of the 8 shops from the upcoming Samurai Shop Set!
▲ These are all the accessories I printed out for my 8 shops, enough to fill out all the interiors and several exteriors, too! I printed some of the bigger accessories (e.g. tables and shelves) at 0.2mm layers, and the smaller items at 0.1mm layers. Some of them (the musical instruments, for example) are quite tiny indeed, and will benefit from thin layers and a slower print speed.
All of these items can be printed support-free.
▲ Shop #1 is the UMBRELLA shop. It's all about the paper umbrellas, of course, and these are printed in 2 halves, with a thin stick inserted as the handle. I found they looked good hanging off the front of the shop.... 
▲ ... and carefully displayed on the interior walls and on raised tatami benches. There is also a display cabinet of folded umbrellas on the right, which is printed flat but should be glued at an angle, as shown in the photo above.
▲ The TOY shop is shop #2, and I modelled it with display windows at the front. I glued kites to the display on the left, and the tiny, tiny doll display in the window on the right. You can choose whether to cover the front with a wooden grill, or leave the display open. There is also a customised noren curtain at the entrance of the shop.
▲ Inside would typically be a colourful assortment of traditional wooden and bamboo toys. There are one-piece toy shelves covered in wooden animals and fat daruma dolls, empty shelves which can be stocked with trays of toys, and a table with some wooden games.
▲ Shop #3 is the POTTERY shop, which is pretty basic. It has a customised noren curtain at the door, and a couple of low tables of vases outside.
▲ Inside are large shelves stacked with various dishes, bowls, vases and pots. These are all one-piece print items.
▲ The CLOTH shop is one of the fancier shops in the set. The exterior of the store has a large wooden sign on the front roof, and some discreet display windows full of cloth stands.
▲ The interior, on the other hand, is quite elegant and very detailed. On the right we have a raised tatami area where customers would stand to be fitted and measured. Several stands of cloth (I printed some of them at a taller 120% height for variation) are displayed, and an ornate paper screen allows customers to change.
▲ On the other side of the shops are hundreds of rolls of cloth, which will look great in a wide variety of colours. The stands of cloth would typically be draped in very gorgeous kimono fabrics.
▲ Shop #5 has some awesome accessories - the RICE shop! The exterior is usually nothing fancy, but we have a large tub of rice on a bench on the left, a customised noren curtain over the door (and another smaller sign on the post on the right), and a brilliant rice-cleaning machine, too. I'll show off a picture of the real-life machine in the next blog article!
▲ The interior has, of course, a huge stack of rice bails on one side, and on the other is another large tub of rice, and a rice-pounding machine. This machine comes in a few parts, and should be glued together as shown. It's very simple to operate - you put rice in the stone bowl, and then raise and drop the heavy wooden beam using the handle on top.
▲ I think shop #6 is going to feature as a game objective in many of your wargames - it's the sake (rice-wine) shop! Traditionally, sake (rice-wine) is a better quality and more expensive alcohol, but you'll also find cheaper shochu (potato-wine) in any store. The outside of this shop has a single sake barrel and a large customised fabric screen on the right, two large paper lanterns by the doorway, and a traditional tub-and-bucket display and another smaller sign on the post on the left.
▲ The interior has a giant vat and ladle, a stack of sake barrels and basic barrels on benches, and a shelf and low table full of wooden cups and bottles. It's definitely party time!
▲ There are only two more shops to go now, but these are probably my favourites. #7 is the MUSIC shop, with various traditional musical instruments on display. I might leave the front window display boxes open, so players can view the shamisen (3-string banjo?) and large koto easily? There's also a large wooden sign on the roof, and a smaller paper sign on the left next to it.
▲ The interior has some lovely details, with bamboo flutes on boxes on shelves, several sizes of drums, and shamisen and koto instruments on the raised tatami playing area on the left.
▲ Finally we come to shop #8, the last of the set. This is the TEA shop, which has plenty of outdoor seating in front. I've used a long noren curtain right the way across, two small paper lanterns on the posts, and cloth-covered benches underneath the large paper umbrella.
On the left we also have a customised top for the new LED shop sign, which says 'tea shop'. Sadly, I didn't have any white filament available (which works better with LEDs), so I will probably just paint that as solid, but another version can also be fitted with thin paper if you want to light it with an LED bulb. This new lantern is considerably shorter than the previous wooden LED lantern, by the way, because it uses a smaller CR1632 battery.
▲ The interior of the tea shop has a mix of cloth-covered benches and larger tatami seating, with two kettle firepits and a small shelf and water bucket.
Phew! We're done! That's all 8 of the new shops! Just think, if 8 shops are still not enough for you, you can also mix in the accessories from the 10 market stalls for even more!!
These shops are currently on the paint desk, and will be released next week! Watch this space...
Samurai Shops 
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