This is a desperate attempt to not drop below one post a month, not boding well at all for the original plan of one miniature a week. I'm sure January is not too late for a Christmas themed miniature either.
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| Plague Santa |
I bought this guy from the
Wargames Foundry, a company set up by Bryan Ansell of Games Workshop fame. This was definitely a bit of Christmas painting fun, mostly done between wrapping presents. I was short of festive decorations and I like the miniature a lot, this is not a santa that makes it on to very many Christmas cards. He was one of four scary santa's from the Foundry, I'll post the others at some point if I manage to finish them. In the meantime, a picture from the Foundry site, I'm sure they'll be back on sale in November.
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| Wargames Foundry Scary Santas |
The Plague mask and corpse in a sack makes for a suitably odd Santa, I'm guessing he's visiting or possibly already visited somebody on the naughty list. Doctors genuinely wore these masks in the 17th century, they stuffed the beak with herbs which were supposed to protect them from the plague, I checked
Wikipedia and so it must be true.
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| One of the more easy going images from googling "16th century plague doctor mask" |
The number one thing I learnt from painting him was that slotta bases were a really great idea, I relied on just the tiny metal base initially, I glued it to an old pot so that I had something to hold and it fell off, repeatedly. I then thought I could rely on the base alone only to find that stability was a problem and in the end to stop rubbing the paint off I pinned him to a slotta base and I think he looks all the better for it. All of the fiddling around before I finally pinned him down did lead to the white trim ending up a little grungy due to all of the handling but I figure that he has a corpse in a sack and so a dirty trim is appropriate.
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| Meet Ivan |
Ivan is probably what happens after one too many 'Bah-Humbugs'.
The second biggest lesson I learnt was base the miniature at the start, it so much easier, cleaner and it is impossible to damage the paint work. For the snowy base I used Citadels Mourn Mountain Snow, I've been dubious of the benefits of the textured paints but to be fair, applying it with a little scoop and spreading it with a brush worked quite well, it was very quick.
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| I'm not sure about the blue tinge to the dirty snow |
I was a little surprised how at how much textured paint shrank when it dried but I did apply it very thickly. I tried a blue wash first and wasn't impressed so then I used Agrax Earthshade to dirty it up, followed by drybushing it with grey and white. Next time I might just apply a white drybrush.
