Silent night? Nah, let’s make it a holey night!

Red Gobbo

There’s still time to fit in a bit more hobby before the end of the year, so here’s Games Workshop’s 2023 Christmas model, Da Red Gobbo’s Surprise! The majority of my LED miniature projects are intended as gaming pieces, but this one is definitely more for display.

Modelling

This model was an absolute gift to illuminate, as most of the scenic base is hollow, including the chimney. You can see this in the ‘work in progress’ images below. The techniques I used to achieve this were similar to those in my Nighthaunt LED Candle short-form tutorial, with each LED and resistor pair repeated in parallel.

The dynamite fuse and the fairy lights are made with individual 3V ultra nano SMD chip LEDs, with Water Splash Effect Gel used to create the sparks and fairy light bulbs respectively. I enhanced the sparking fuse effect with tiny 2-3mm lengths of fibre optic cable that I cut and inserted into the acrylic gel at different angles while it was still curing.

I must admit I did think about skipping the fairy lights on the grappling hook wire, since they’re on the back of the model and may not be seen. But in the end I knew that I I would feel I hadn’t done a proper job on the miniature if I didn’t include them. I went for red, yellow, green, blue, and then back to red again to give the impression of a repeating pattern that was part of a much longer string of lights. The 3V ultra nano SMD chip LEDs I used were not available in yellow or green from my normal supplier, so I simply used white LEDs and then applied a glaze of paint to the acrylic gel ‘bulbs’ in the required colour to tint the white light. The flickering chimney fire is made from a 3mm candle effect LED (and 47 ohm resistor) directly under the hollow chimney.

When planning this miniature, I did also consider illuminating the Red Gobbo’s eyes, to make it look like he was wearing night vision goggles similar to my Grot Kommando. But in the end, I decided against it. The Red Gobbo is pictured with simple flying goggles in the artwork and animations, so I applied Rule 1 of my LED Miniature Design Philosophy and just painted the goggles as blue glass.

Painting

When painting this miniature I mostly followed my own Ork-related paint recipes found in this article and the suggestions for Da Red Gobbo in the Citadel Colour App. I did consider using snow flock again, as I had previously with Red Gobbo & Bounca, but I was concerned it might obscure some of the detail on the base, like the presents and fairy lights. In the end I decided to simply hand paint the snow.

As an aside, if you ever find you need to paint miniature baubles(!), then my tip is to paint the bauble in a light silver like Runefang Steel, and then apply two coats of either Spiritstone Red, Soulstone Blue or Waystone Green. This gives a lovely shiny festive finish!

That’s it for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this bit of festive fun! Thanks very much for reading, and please remember you can also find me sharing my work on Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon.