Skitarii Claus

Instead of any of the three festive miniatures from GW that I need to build and paint, inspiration hit first on making a standard mini more Christmas-themed. And so, I present: Skitarii Claus.

A month or so ago I finally picked up a couple of the previous festive minis from Games Workshop — Da Red Gobbo’s Surprise and Grotmas Gitz. GW have of course then released another new festive mini (Da Red Gobbo’s A-bomb-inable Snowman), which has just arrived this morning.

In the meantime though, on a visit to the Newcastle Warhammer shop with my son recently, they mentioned a promotion GW is running around painting up one of your miniatures in a festive fashion. In store they had painted one of the miniatures of the month — a Hernkyn Yaegir — like Father Christmas and that got me thinking about what I might do as a quick bit of fun.

On getting home I had a rummage around a few minis to hand and spotted a couple of Skitarii Rangers I’d picked up cheap on ebay, already built and primed. The cloak felt like it could work for some Santa styling, so that was my decision made: a nice cheap mini I didn’t mind too much if I ruined.

Now I’ll be honest, very little planning went into this. 

With the hooded cloak, a path to an easy festive scheme seemed relatively obvious and so that evening I made a start. I was ‘inspired’ to try adding some fluffy edging to the cloak for that slightly more authentic Santa look but, again, with little to no planning I just grabbed some PVA and static grass from Army Painter and went at it.

The strands of grass are far too big for the effect I really wanted but in for a penny, in for a pound so I finished it off and decided to see how it went. I even added a clump on the back of the hood to try to create a Santa bobble.

Grass/fluff applied, I got a cheap drybrush and applied a base coat of Dawnstone through a mix of stippling and overbrushing to get coverage. While clearly very scruffy, the effect wasn’t awful and so I applied a quick red base coat to the cloak to try and encourage myself.

Over the next few nights, I worked on bits here and there. My lack of planning really started to bite as I got into the details. I’d roughly resolved to obscure or skim over a lot of the detailed little mechanical bits in the interests of a simpler Christmas look, but I still quickly had decisions to make on colours that I didn’t have a ready answer for.

Pretty poor show for a designer by trade, but that’s where I was.

I got it in my head that I could introduce a deep green for the mask and even chest plate (still a Christmas colour, right?) but once I’d done it, it looked awful. I also had ambitions of painting up the rifle in candy-cane stripes but lack of experience and skill, plus rapidly waning enthusiasm for this mini project, meant I gave up pretty easily.

I just wanted to get this done: it was meant to be a funny quick idea and was turning into a chore because I hadn’t thought it through. Time for decisions to make things easier and get it finished: gold for anything metallic; red over most of the green areas to simplify the colour scheme again.

With a bit more direction, finishing the model didn’t take long in the end. I spent most time trying to do a reasonable job of shading and highlighting the red cloak and everything else got a pretty cursory pass. In person, I’m pretty happy with some of the detail I managed on the red, but I can totally see why you need to go much higher contrast on shadows and highlights: in photos and on the tabletop the smaller changes in light I’ve applied just don’t stand out. This is a good lesson for me to come out of this piece though.

At last, Skitarii Claus was born:

In the end, I’m quite happy with this mini despite losing interest halfway through. It doesn’t photograph brilliantly but it does look decent in person and certainly has that Christmas-y vibe I was after.

The grass-as-fur technique kind of worked and has certainly given me something to consider for similar effects in future.

It also gave me a chance to try out a snowy base for the first time: something I have plans for some other miniatures I’ll care more about in future, so that was handy. I applied Stirland Mud technical paint first, to give that base ground texture and deep brown mud colour. Once that was dry, I added a single 'winter gradd' from Gamers Grass, then applied Valhallan Blizzard technical paint over the top for the snow itself.

Overall, pretty happy with this and a nice early little intro to the festive season.