Ninjas! The black pyjama-wearing sneaky merchants of death!

Let’s just ignore for a minute the fact that our modern image of the Japanese ninja is probably a load of old bollocks, and just skip right to the part where they’re cool.

These miniatures are Perry and show our shinobi friends in the typical black pyjamas-with-hood getup. They’re armed with an array of stereotypical ninja weapons, including shinobigatana, kusarigama, shurikens and one guy chucking a smoke bomb or grenade. The sculpts (as expected from the Perrys) are excellent, and the amount of flash on them was less than some other Perry miniatures I’ve seen.

I’ve never really felt that confident painting black, but these weren’t hard to do. I basecoated in a fairly dark grey, then applied Army Painters black-pigmented “Dark Tone” Quickshade. I suck at painting on highlights, putting the quckshade on first gives a bit of a pointer where they go. I just used a much lighter grey. I only did a single layer, obviously if you did multiple highlights and blending you’d get a better result, but these guys are good enough for the table as is.

I painted them for Ronin (medieval Japanese skirmish) but also for Black Ops. In the latter they’ll probably be armed with swords and handguns, which are presumably tucked away in a pocket somewhere.