Painting and building the Snowstorm

The Snowstorm - Malifaux from Wyrd Games

He's a big hairy Wendigo, trapped next to a Silent One.. and is sort of pivotal in many Rasputina crews, so me, like many others, have been waiting for this fella to come out in plastic for quite some time.

There is lots more of this stuff on my Malifaux pages

Currently most of the painted examples I can find online are of the old metal Snowstorm so this may be one of the first walk-throughs of the plastic set online?

The new Snowstorm is very definately a "big Wendigo" so I wanted to largely copy the look and feel of my proper Wendigo, which was done without use of inks or washes, but by drybrushing in various shades of grey. Luckily I still had most of the paints !

The first challenge though for the Snowstorm was making him. A fairly simple model, with no overly-fiddly parts... however this seems to have meant that the parts that do fit together , well, don't really fit together that well at all. After using liquid poly glue there were still plenty of large and visible gaps on the model, as well as a number of prominent mould lines which needed to be scraped off with a sharp scalpel. To fill the gaps I initially tried using a "paint" of diluted normal builders filler/plaster, which worked on some of the smaller gaps. The larger gaps I reverted to my substitute-for-green-stuff, wood filler. This comes ready mixed, and as long as you don't allow it to dry out too much is very easy to slop into small gaps. It dries really quickly, and can be sanded with a small file, like these ones on eBay UK.

The model is also standing in a way which means that his feet will lap over the edge of a the 50mm base he comes with, and so I elected to pin his rear foot to the base to provide a bit more stability. You can just about see the metal pin in the rear foot here - unfortunately this meant that I forgot / missed the need to fill the gaps in the base of this foot until I had the whole thing assembled and painted... !

Here he is standing up on the base - the base is covered with glued-in sand, in line with my standard basing scheme for all my Malifaux figures. At this point he is not glued on - just the pin is holding him upright.

And with the Silent One - who looks a bit Tess of the D'Urbervilles to be honest, but astonishingly is a one-piece casting from Wyrd! Of course, it couldn't be that easy, and once she is in place inbetween in the Snowstorm's legs, her base is floating a few mm off the floor... aarrgh!

All three pieces - base, snowstorm and Silent One - were sprayed black separately. This only gets assembled once everything is painted...

And here they are all together again. The Snowstorm has been painted with successive layers of drybrushing, with a base of Uniform Grey layered over with Vallejo Field Blue for the "skin" (it;s almost grey, but hasd a subtle tinge of blue) and various lighter shades of grey (through to white) for the hairy bits. The horns I did in what used to be GW Bleached Bone, as I wanted them to stand out a bit on what is otherwise a rather, well, grey model. The Silent One is in German Field Grey -- which is sort of green - and is in line with my two proxy Silent Ones

The "real" Silent Ones" are proxies from the Reaper Bones range. Whether the one with the bow and arrow is quite right I'm not sure, but the other one with two swords is pretty much spot on and could sit in the Wyrd pack quite happily

Rear View

You can see in this shot that I have built-up the show on the base a little in order to make it meet up with the bottom of the Silent One's skirt. My not entirely unsuccesful attempt to paint eyes on the Snowstorm can also be seen

From the back... the blue tinge to his skin is almost too subtle to see in this lighting.

and from the final angle. I painted the ribbon-y thing that is slapping across his thigh as a leather strap on the basis that the two models are supposed to be bound together, and also as my Silent Ones also have a few bits of similar strapping on them too. White teeth, deep red inside of the mouth and Bleached Bone fingernails and claws. The final touch was a small amount of flesh on the palms of the hands and just around the gum line and drybrushed onto the nose.

The final touch was a small amount of flesh on the palms of the hands and just around the gum line and drybrushed onto the nose.

That's the end - so why not go back to my Malifaux pages and look for some more stuff ?

You can comment about this model on the thread about how I painted it on the Wyrd Forum

View Stats for My Malifaux Pages