Santa Claus 2

This is the second part of my recently completed Santa figures - part one is here.

The bases on these figures were more involved than last week's, and one worked better than the other...

Foundry Skeleton Santa

Some you win, some you lose, and this base just didn't live up to how it looked in my imagination :-(

I created some rough ground in front of him to represent his grave, then sculpted some piles of earth that were "breaking apart", to give the impression that he was bursting out of it . This looked so much better in my head, but I just couldn't translate it to the base. What I ended up with was some rough ground, without much movement. To be fair, he does look like he's levering himself out vertically, so I'm not even sure that the bursting ground would have matched his pose.

The rest of the ground was a traditional mix of filler, sand and PVA glue. It went on without incident, so then it was time to paint the thing.

I started with my standard burnt umber for the ground. At this point, I should have washed it with white or green. Unfortunately, I left it plain, added a couple of tufts of grass then flocked the thing with GW snow. This took a couple of layers, and just really doesn't look good. I think there's too much brown showing through, which would have been lessened had I washed the ground first.

I also managed to mess up the edge of the base - just not my day with this figure. I thought that painting it white might help distract from the look of the snow, but about four coats later, the black of the base was still visible. At this point, I decided to try burnt umber around the edge. It's better than the white, but still nowhere near what I had hoped for.

Like I said, some you win, some you lose.

Citadel Dwarf Santa

I have been collecting and painting miniatures for more than thirty years. Every so often I have a figure that I think is fairly rare - a limited edition from twenty years or more kind of thing, or something from a company that has long disappeared. Every time I think that, however, I find that someone has two hundred copies of the figure, or, more annoyingly, that it's still in production*

I haven't seen this one about on the Web, but according to Stunties, he was a promotional figure from the Cheshire store opening. I have never been to Cheshire, so how he came into my possession is anyone's guess.

The mace and chainmail were done using the red metallic approach I used on the Space Santa, but other than that, not much to report on the figure painting front.

There was, however, another basing saga with this figure, but with a happier ending. I had planned to simply have the rock (cork) base attached to a slottabase, so I glued it to a standard slottabase using tacky glue. I then decided this looked silly, and that it would look much nicer on a plinth. Tacky glue is not one for giving up its hold without a fight, so I had to cut the base off using a scalpel. I got away with it without too much damage, but it was a near thing.

The (not visible in the photograph) plinth is from MDP, spray painted white. The white look did work this time (I actually did this one before the skeleton figure, which is why I tried white on its base edge)

It took two coats of snow on the rocks for coverage, but overall, I'm happy with the way this one turned out.

* I have had the Citadel Dwarf Big Game Hunter and Dwarf Samurai models since they came out in the 1980s. I had thought they were now very rare, but it turns out that Citadel are still producing them...