Brief - Da Red Gobbo 2019

Back in 2019 I started to visit the local Warhammer store frequently and did a thing, that seemed totally crazy to me at that time.

I bought a mini for 30€ - only for painting.

Nowadays that’s business as usual - but at that time it felt like burning money with a match.

Why did I do then? The store manager, who is still my most beloved store managers ever - convinced me to join a store wide painting competition:

~3 weeks time to paint “Da red Gobbo” till Christmas and bring it to the store.

The Mission

There were 3 Categories if I remember right

• Best Painting
• Best Conversion
• YoungbloodClose to 40

At that time, youngblood was not an option. And for Painting, I knew that there were some painters at least on the same level as me.

Thus I planned to do some “major” conversion work too.

The Plan

Painting wise I planned to keep the boxart colors and give my best. The only change is the gun where I wanted to paint my first ever NMM.

For the conversion - I never did more than switching a weapon - I thought about typical christmas things to add.

Raindeers, presents, Candles, sledge.Christmas tree…. That's it! A christmas tree.

What about Santa going downhill to town on a Sledge sitting on a christmas tree!

That’s it!

Implementation - or revisiting the plan

When developing a vision in mind - the execution is not part of the process. And that is a good thing, cause you shouldn't limit your thoughts in the first place.

But at some point, you have to find a way to execute the idea - And in worst case, revisit the plan if it is not possible.

Exactly that happened:

• How to place the Gobbo on a tree?
• How to fit a tree on the small base
• And anyway - How to build a tree?

Remove the tree from the equation and replace it. But with what?

I thought about the scene:

Gobbo Santa -> sledge -> downhill -> Speed -> ROCKET!!!!

and that should be doable with greenstuff, even with my limited skills.

Build

As said - I haven't been confident in building at that time thus I did some things more complicated than I’d do today.

Breaking down the todos revealed:

• Build a hill on the base
• Build a sledge
• Build a rocket
• Modify the gobo to sit on it
• Remove the wishlist between his legs
• Build a replacement

The Base

My experience with Kork was ok. Some wood glue and layers of ripped of pieces did the trick. To close the gaps of the Kork, I covered the whole thing in liquid gold ... eeh green stuff ( but it's the same price point). Nowadays I’d use wood glue or cheap modeling clay.

The Rocket Sledge

This could have been easily assembled with ice cream sticks, a knife and glue - but at that time I was totally focused on green stuff.

Unfortunately - tiny greenstuff sticks are all but strong to hold the structure and the first try went to trash.

As this didn’t work out, I used some plastic card profiles. I don’t even remember why I owned these, cause diorama building hasn't been a thing back then, but they were strong enough … and H-beam shaped.

Now H-beams are overkill for a sledge and smart Mike from the past, filled it with greenstuff, of course.

The planks were purely made by greenstuff. Simply cutting out the shape from thin rolled planes. Same for the skids, but they had to be Hung on a think brush handle to keep the curved shape after drying.

Everything was glued together and Tadada! Appeared promising.

The easiest part was the rocket. By remembering my playdough skills, a cylinder and cone were no challenge, while the fuse was a bit tricky. Of course greenstuff has been used to create a small thread, very fiddly and ease to break apart. Probably you know what would have been better to model a thread?

... Right ... a real thread.

The Gobbo

The gobbo needed to sit on the rocket - and I have been too afraid to break his legs.

So I planned to let him stand on the sledge with the rocket between his legs. Just some carving of gaps in the rocket and a new sauna towel to hide the Christmas balls.

Painting

About the painting I was quite nervous cause there were many new challenges never tackled before:

• Freehand
• Nmm
• Create snow
• Clean clean clean

But before putting paint on it - there pop up another compositional idea:

I hoped to be able to place the grenade bag on the base - but it was just not enough space. The bag was partly hanging with a physical impossible pose in the air - so abandoned idea.

In general I went for subassemblies and primed them while being glued to some Cork + Wire + bluetag handle. Very shaky and not suggested to imitate.

First was the sledge - nothing fancy but I found it tricky to highlight the browns - thus I used black and white images to check:

The challenge for the rocket were the freehand stripes. Masking tape is great - on flat surfaces. I wasted more time in trying to mask that pretty *** thing than the actual freehand took when I finally dropped the idea of masking

The Snow

Also something new - and there are tons of tutorials. I decided to go for baking soda as the snow products cost something and I'd nether thought to need them again. One test is with white paint mixed and one without. For the Christmas feeling the later one seemed to be the better fit. As you can see, the snow is pure white - quite over the top and comic style in retrospective.

Combining the Rock, Rocket and snow I'’'ve been quite happy and glued the fragile fuse. To make the scene even more dramatic, some fire was added - I think it was cut somewhere from the GW salamanders extension frames.

Painting the flame was - weird. I tried to tint the area around it but the soda soaked it up. A few more covers and I left it - somewhere slumbered the fear that the soda will melt away (-:

Close to Gold

The goblin itself was quite straight forward. Most challenging was the NMM and the tiny, close to non visible freehand in the side-pocket dynamite.

Let's start with the NMM.I wanted to create a golden gun. Well it's up to you to search for the gold. But in the end, Copper was fine too. Sure, it misses secondary reflections and detail, but for a first try I've been quite happy.

For whatever reason I invested a lot of time in the nearly invisible dynamite in the side bag. I freehanded the structure first with a darker green and the with two layers of brighter. And the effect was very impressing for me.

The part I didn’t like at that time is the wooly inner side of the cloak - It was just that the boxart was very white but my version turned more brown - Nowadays I like it even more than the boxart.

So here are the final images - Photography skills were quite limited at that time, but I don't want to hide anything - not even that.

PS

I found photos in WIPs of my painting setup at that time - It was a temporary setup and the colors and tools were stored in a make-up case which required a bit of setup time every day. And the colours? Yes that were the only ones I owned - Not everything was bad at that time.