A Merry Squigmass to all, and to all a good fight!

Red Gobbo

One final model for 2022, ‘Red Gobbo & Bounca‘. I received this kit as a Christmas present from a good friend this time last year, and it has been sitting on the Shelf of Shame ever since, waiting for the holiday season to roll around again. This model won’t be joining any army projects, it’s simply a fun festive display piece.

Modelling & Painting

This was a record for me in terms of number of LEDs on a single infantry-sized model, seven in all. It was originally eight – there was an additional red light on the end of the fairy light string – but the connection for the eighth LED became damaged during installation. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t seem to fix it so I decided to cut my losses – literally – and snip the failed LED from the end of the string.

I had to work quite quickly on this project in order to get it done, photographed and shared by today. I didn’t want it to sit on the shelf for another year! So that’s why there aren’t many ‘work in progress’ pictures – I couldn’t spare the time to stop and take them. But I did capture this picture of the wiring shown above. It might look complex, but the design is a fairly basic circuit. Every LED is in series with a single resistor, and every LED and resistor pair are connected in parallel with all the other pairs. The entire circuit is driven from a single coin cell battery and switch under the base. Essentially it is my Simple Muzzle Flare tutorial, but with the LED and resistor repeated multiple times in parallel.

If you are trying to reproduce this then a useful tip I found was to paint a dot of colour on each of the resistors to remind me which colour LEDs they were supposed to connect to, since different colour LEDs have different resistor requirements. This was easier than looking on the tiny resistor colour code rings or testing with a multimeter each time. You can see these spots if you look carefully in the image above. This photo was taken just before the wires were coiled up above the resistors and covered in a thin layer of modelling putty to hold them in place.

When it came to positioning the LEDs on the model, I tried to replace the sculpted plastic lights with real LEDs on a one-for-one basis, which I largely achieved. Thankfully I didn’t have to spend a lot of time hiding the wires, as there were already sculpted wires on show as part of the model, so I left the actual wires on show and then painted over them. The LEDs that formed part of the fairly lights were secured with a small blob of glue from a hot glue gun. When dry, the transparent glue also acted as the ‘bulb’ of the light. However I stuck to my normal acrylic gel method when sculpting the fuse on the dynamite.

For the paint scheme, I followed my recent Ork-related paint schemes found in this article. The snow on the base was from a tub of ‘Citadel Snow’ that I’ve had hanging around since about 2009. Once I had hidden the wire under the putty on the base, I painted the putty Fenrisian Grey, which is a cool, light blue-grey. Next I gave it a heavy Corax White drybrush. Finally I applied a thick coat of PVA and the Citadel Snow, which is basically a fine white flock.

So there we have it, a small but intricate model! I’m quite pleased with how this turned out, but if I could go back again with a bit more time I’d probably take more care on the fairy lights to make them neater, and also add some more layers to the highlights on the squig hide. Those are only minor gripes though, and as I said overall I’m pleased with the finished miniature.

So that’s it for this week, I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun festive figure! As always, thanks very much for reading, and please don’t forget you can also follow my work on social media at Twitter, Mastodon and Instagram. Merry Christmas everyone!