I cannot think of a more apt model to paint on Christmas Eve than 1986's Sanity Claws. The limited edition release model of that same year is rather loosely based on Ian Miller's fantastic White Dwarf cover. It still astounds me to think artwork of this quality was once produced to grace a mere magazine's front cover. We really were treated to some incredible artwork in the 1980s in speciality magazines. Here I think of the fantastic pieces that graced the covers of CRASH or Zzap64 alongside GM, Starburst and other mags. I find today's AI slop depressing and the generic 'corporate' fantasy or sci-fi of modern GW repetitive, limpid and uninspired.
Sci-Fi by numbers... or should that be 'paint your own 40k'?
Still, there are the odd bastion of creativity and originality out there if you look, often in the world of indie PC games or some of the better board games that get released. I still feel we had the best of it and that fact should be celebrated.
Here's the cover of White Dwarf 84 alongside the brilliant Christmas pudding issue graphic. Many old school fans of the RPG days of WD bemoan this issue as the beginning of the end of what White Dwarf had been. A proper supplement for role-playing games. It had served an avid audience for nearly 10 years at this point... Players of Traveller, Runescape D&D and a myriad of other dice-rollers. The sun was setting on that golden age of RPGs spurred on by the 1970s fantasy boom, and a new world was dawning... a world of the Warhammers.
That was still a few months away however.
Sanity Claws is a mystery. He is obviously loosely based on the figure seen here on in Ian Miller's artwork, oddly named Sanity Clause in the published material. Why he was created is never mentioned in the magazine. There are no rules or fluff to accompany him. Beyond the most likely explanation, that he was a cool sculpt by Bob Naismith and would probably sell over the Christmas period, he had no real reason to exist.
My model was one of a large number of unfinished pieces recently returned to me. I can recall trying to paint him Christmas 2018 perhaps? But never really finding the mojo to finish him. Life was stressful and slowly unravelling and I didn't have the time to devote hours to classic Citadel lead. If I had done, I think I would have found myself out on my own a lot sooner.
Perhaps I should have soldiered on back then and finished him only to arrive here quicker?
He was very dusty and scratched when I plucked him from the shelf this morning. I'm not sure where he's been all these years but he was caked in dust. A good tickling with a brand new flat brush was enough to dislodge all that residue and I found a figure basecoated and blocked out in its colours pretty much ready to go. A green ink wash over the gribbly face, a brown ink wash over the clothing and metalwork and I was off.
It was quite simple to work up the green basecoat using a Foundry Green I found in the attic. It has no label and it looks quite snotty and with increasing amounts of Sunburst Yellow mixed in gave me the deep, sickly Lovecraftian hue of Ian Miller's original piece. For traditional reasons I avoided the pink robes, preferring a little Christmas spirit in the deep red, highlighted with Hobgoblin Orange, that I clothed him in. Bleached Bone gave me a tatty hem of fur highlighted in Skull White after a brown ink glaze.
I drybrushed his sack to give it a burlap feel but I'm not sure I got the colour quite right. I've done a fair bit of mixing orange with Bestial Brown and Snakebite Leather recently and I am pleased with the natural tones I am getting. I doesn't seem to have worked with this figure.
The metal work was done as per my usual skeleton horde method. Mithril Silver, Black or Brown Ink wash and then highlighted up again. I mix blacks with the silver in stages until I use the stuff neat on the edges.
The base is unique in everything I've ever painted. To be honest, I just used the same method I usually do from green just with blue. I think it was Electric Blue for the base, drybrushed over with an Electric Blue/Skull White 50:50 mix then pure white over the top of that. I like to think it looks better to the naked eye and that my camera is rubbish, but I am not quite so sure now.
Perhaps I am just getting past it all... Despite that, I find spending time in the solitude of my workshop very therapeutic and I have quite a pile of old battered lead to keep me going now, and more than a little plastic. Its all battered and has seen better days, very much like the author of this post, but it is pleasing to me.
I hope it is to you too.
Happy Christmas...
Here's hoping we don't get visited by Sanity Claws tonight.
Orlygg
No comments:
Post a Comment