Sanity Claws; Happy Christmas fellow bloggers (and 100 posts!)

A while ago, to celebrate the anniversary of this blog, I asked if any of my readers would like me to paint a model of theirs for them; well two were done and a third was waiting for JB of Leadplague to send me something through. He decided he wanted me to paint Sanity Claws, which I'm sure was a ruse to ensure I painted it before Christmas, well I managed it, just:

I put a lot of thought into this paint scheme (believe it or not!) It's hard to stray from the traditional colours of Santa Claus, or as the Dutch settled in America called him "Sinterklaas" and I was hoping a bit of research into the original St. Nicholas would provide me with an alternative colour scheme. Alas nothing struck me as better than the expected, so I decided to stick with the red cloak in the end. But this model was a complete bitch to paint. The sculpt is very characterful, but quite hard to interpret some of the details (there's obviously a spanner in his bag and I think the other item is a wrench but it looked way too much like a robot dinosaur and I was very close to painting it with green scales). I painted the elongated shape next to the manacles(?) as a Christmas cracker and the slightly bizarre bell/axe was confusing too. On top of this there are some quite fiddly areas to get my brush into too.

I went for a pale green skin tone to complement the red cloak and added a touch of blue to the white fur to create a cooler feel to the warm red. In hindsight I wish I had added some pale red or black rings around his eye to make it stand out further.

The base is created with a few bristles from a paint brush as reeds and the snow is baking soda sprinkled onto some pva. I hope it yellows over time!

Well I tried my best, better than I usually do on such challenging models as it is for someone else, I only hope JB likes it enough...

So finally from me I wish all my readers a Happy Christmas even if it may be a bit tainted by Chaos.... which is as it should be,