From KevinH - Fortnight Challenge - Victorian - Steve Saleh's Ratcatcher

Here is my entry in the "Victorian" Fortnight Challenge for the 2015 Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.

Amongst the figures I bought from my friend's Estate sale, was the beautiful Wargames Foundry, Limited Edition "Victorian Ratcatcher" model by Steve Saleh.  Wow, this is a great model!  Nice, crisp detail, great proportions, cute "character."  It's a bit bigger than most 28mm's (maybe a "29mm" if you like), and sort of a bit more "heft" than most 28's, but those things don't harm this model at all.  When I found it among the figures I'd picked up, I knew I wanted to paint it for the Challenge - then, I noticed "Victorian" was one of the Fortnight Challenges!

I like the little rat poking it's head out of the cage, and the one crawling up over the shoulder.  I was tempted to start Googling pics from the movie, "Willard" but decided against that.  When I started cleaning the model earlier this week, I was thinking about clipping off the cast base, and sculpting a "sewer" base for this guy.  Then I noticed the one additional rat on the ground, between his feet.  Rather than trying to cut around the rat, and maybe risk ruining the rat, I decided to just glue the figure to a GW base, and do basic Liquitex Resin Sand groundwork instead.

This was a pretty straight-forward paint job.  I was a bit rushed on it, as "Life" threw me a curveball today, but I think it turned out OK.  I stumbled on a nice trick for the gold buttons and top hat buckle - I base-painted those items with a "dark yellow" (basically, the colour of  WWII 'Late War' German armour).  I'm never quite happy with how Gold paints onto a model - often the paint itself is a bit thin, as it's really just "carrier" with Gold flecks.  The dark yellow base colour helps unify those flecks, and I didn't get the "streaky" Gold I usually get!  Maybe this isn't something new to most of you, but it was something I tried on the spur of the moment, and it worked great!  I'll have to try using a Grey base for Silver and Gun Metal paint next!

When I was poking around for some "rat catcher" reference pics to give me some inspiration, I came across this old illustration (surprisingly, there seem to be very few pics of the miniature out there on the Internets!).  So for my final pic of this post, I added in a couple of dog models my friend had painted.

I think it makes for a nice grouping!

Thanks for looking!