Santa Claus 1

Just before the pictures, a small cause for celebration: this blog has been going for a whole year, so happy bloggaversary to it :-)

Anyway, some new figures this week. I made the mistake of going down the "proper painting" route again, so these have taken a long time (a fact made worse by doing fancy bases, some of which worked better than others). One day I will learn...

Over the years I have collected some Santa Claus figures. I painted one up a couple of years ago, and finally decided to paint the rest of them.

Foundry Santa

This is the most traditional of the Santas, painted up a few years ago.

The next two figures are hot off the painting palette.

Foundry Plague Santa

His base is the simplest of the group - a Fenris base I got free with a Hasslefree order. I wanted the ground visible through the snow, to create an unclean feeling, more in keeping with the Plague theme.

The "snow" is Citadel's snow, which I got from my brother-in-law. It's okayyyy, but it's made from long fibres, as opposed to snow shaped ones. It doesn't look too bad from a distance, but I'm not sure it's something I would recommend.

Citadel Space Santa

This is an old Citadel Limited Edition figure from way back - probably late 80s, early 90s - that I've had since it first came out (but never quite got around to painting).

I took a while to decide on the colours for his gun. Given that he's Santa, I didn't want it to be too "serious", so no black or gunmetal. I was watching a show on TV and one of the characters had a Nerf sniper rifle, in orange and blue. The colour scheme looked promising, so I tracked down pictures of Nerf guns, to see what other colours they used. In the end, I went with orange and blue for the main colours, with some yellow and black for his pistol. I'm actually quite pleased with the way it turned out, and it keeps the figure looking fairly "jolly".

One thing I've been experimenting with recently is coloured metals. My current approach uses FW Acrylic Inks - Silver Perl as the "metal" with the appropriate colour added (FW Flame Red in this case), generally in a 3:1 ratio. I paint this on over an acrylic metal base of Vallejo Polished Steel, just in case the inks don't cover as well as I want them to. I did this with the round thing on his back, and it worked reasonably well.

There are two more Santa figures that I'm just finishing, so I'll post pictures of them next week. Additionally, I've just finished basing a couple of figures I painted back in April, so lots of new stuff to come before Christmas.