'He's a veritable one-man army! Half-man army. Whatever'.

Last year at Salute, I was able to track down the guy from Westfalia miniatures and acquire a freebie miniature - I was really quite taken with his halflings, and super happy to get one. 

(side-note: have a nose around the Steampunk sections of the Westfalia miniatures website. Look at the Clocktopus, and then try and tell me you're not in love!)

However, as is my way, I decided to save building and painting it for a special treat, which has resulted in it not getting painted for almost a year! Seeing that Salute was rapidly rolling around again, I decided that I was going to get it painted up before then!

Such was my excitement and haste, I was a little incautious in removing his accessories from the sprue they came on, leaving me a little bit of fine green stuff repair work to do:

(Brief side-note: I don't know what sort of resin they use for this range, but I think honestly it's the best I've ever worked with - it cuts and cleans up like a plastic, and is super light, but holds excellent detail).

A brief clean-up later, it was time to decide which of the optional accessories to use. Helmet or no helmet? Holding a weapon or holding a measuring cup? Halberd or crossbow? I quite liked the look of the halberd, although the figure has a quiver of bolts (is that the right term for it when it's bolts rather than arrows?) sculpted on the body piece, so in the end I decided to use absolutely everything:

A little filing on the head to attach the helmet and then everything else piled on in every free space gives us one heavily armed furry footed burrower:

'He's a veritable one-man army! Half-man army. Whatever'.

I'm starting to picture him as some sort of wandering mercenary now, a survivor of countless wars selling his services to the highest bidder (or the one with the most well-equipped kitchen).

Then came basing - only a basic sand blend job, as there isn't really space for anything fancier on his tiny base!

Painting was fairly straightforward, and an absolute delight - as mentioned earlier, the resin holds detail beautifully, and it's a lovely little miniature!

I wanted to give him a little extra detail, and so decided to give the haft of his halberd some stripes - marking out the guide lines with a soft pencil as per usual:

Striiiiiiipes

At this point is finished painting the rest of the miniature, and just needed to decide what colours to use. I briefly considered red and yellow, so that he'd match my Lannister pikemen, but thought that as he was a one-off miniature I'd give him something a bit more interesting, and settled on pink and green (as when we were younger, my wife's official colour scheme was pink green and grey, and so I took inspiration from that for my fantastic heraldry). And lo, here he is finished:

Bringing the Tally to:

18 vs 0 = +18

But that will soon change...