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Sculpt Saxon from Mouse Guard – MM #20

It’s Mini Monday, where I share customizing, scratch building, kitbashing, and miniature painting projects for your roleplaying table. This week we’ll build Saxon, from the Mouse Guard comics.

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In case you’ve never heard of it, Mouse Guard is an award-winning series written by David Petersen. It was also turned into a best-selling tabletop roleplaying game, based on the Burning Wheel system, by Luke Crane. I love the series and the RPG, and I wanted figures to use in my games, so I made one. Let’s take a look.

Saxon from Mouse Guard

I built a wire frame for the model, then covered it with aluminium foil to give it more shape, particularly around the body, face, and ears.

I then used paper mache, much like in our recent Barrow-downs project, to cover the model.

Paper Mache

For fine detail like this model, which stands about 8 cm high (excluding the base), I made a very fine paper mache by shedding newspaper. I tried to soak and mash it finer, which took a lot of effort but did give me a slightly finer paste in the end. Mix this with 1 cup of water to 1 cup of flour.

Paper mache is great for model terrain projects, and although it’s not great for detail work, I chose it because I figured it would give me a furry, natural look, which worked out well.

Saxon Mouse Guard Paper Mache
The base is made of hardboard, and his hands are made of modelling epoxy. You could use Green Stuff too.

Painting

I base coated the model brown with acrylic paint, and picked out the skin of the hands, feet, ears, and tail with a browny pink. I used grey for the base, stippled on with a brush.

I then switched to Citadel Colours for the main coat. I used Snakebite Leather/Ballor Brown and Bestial Brown/Mournfang Brown for the fur, with Skull White/White Scar for the white patches. I heavily watered down the paints to blend them better.

Finally, I used a brown/black mix with lots of water as a wash, covering the whole model.

Finishing

I used pliers to cut a tiny black bead in half, which I superglued on for the eyes. Two coats of matt varnish, and Saxon was almost ready to join the Mouse Guard.

Saxon of the Mouse Guard

Sword and Cape

I’ll cover Saxon’s iconic sword and cape in a later tutorial, because I’ll need to experiment with a few techniques for the sword first. I’ve already tried plastic card, and now I’m shaping some alluminium, which seems to be working very well. Have any ideas? Drop them in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you.

Jump into Mouse Guard

Looking for the comics? You can find Mouse Guard issues on Drive Thru Comics for a cheap $1.99 each. I highly recommend finding the printed books though, they’re gorgeous.