Deathmaster Snikch [1]

I won the Mini Demon competition at the Brisbane GW - yay me! The prize was to pick a Warhammer miniature to do for this month's competition, so as I have some Skaven, I decided to pick Deathmaster Snikch. He's a pretty cool sculpt, so I'm excited to paint him.

I've had a few people ask me a bit about the process, and how long it takes to do a miniature. I'm probably not the fastest painter, and I'm pretty critical about my work, so I do take a long time. I'll try to keep an accurate track of time spent on this project.

So I started with the usual preparation work. Lots of mold lines, and excess flash to remove. I had to be quite careful with this one as with all the fiddly detail, it's easy to miss some of the flash. There was also a mold line running up across the cape that needed some care to remove. I used some jewellers files and a pair of side cutters for the larger stuff. I used a 1mm drill bit to drill holes for pinning on the components, and glued in some lengths of wire paperclip. I removed the large stub on the end of the tail, by clipping it down, then filing it flat to the tail base. It will be pinned directly to the body. Test fitting looked good, and I don't think I'll need to use any green stuff to gap fill anything.

When all the glue was dry, I washed all the miniature's components using detergent and hot water. I washed it twice to make sure all the mold release agent was off the metal, so the paint would adhere.

I glued the main body to the base, then spread some superglue around the base, and used some of the sand and fine rock on the driveway to detail the base. I had thought about building a more detailed sewer base, but as the model was going on the standard base, and not a diorama, it was a bit too small to get too creative with.

I basecoated the figure with Chaos Black using a brush. It took a few coats, and I had to make sure it got into all the crevices on the figure. I'd probably use a spray can usually as it's faster, but I don't have the pocket money to spend $22 on a can of Chaos Black at the moment, so the brush had to do.

When that was all dry, I started painting on the skin. I painted a basecoat of Scorched Brown on all the flesh, followed by Tallarn Flesh. You don't need to be too accurate when applying it, just make sure you've got good coverage of the skin. When it was dry, I washed it with Ogryn Flesh to provide some shading. When it was dry, I brushed on the first highlight of Tallarn Flesh, avoiding the shading that we got from the wash. The next highlight will be a mix of Tallarn Flesh, and Bleached Bone.

So far I've spent 3 hours on it.