This mini was part of the Barkan-Seesholtz collection. It was made by RAFM Miniatures in their “Death Angels” series; RAFM RAF03896 Winged Reaper. My original concept was to put the reaper in a field of tall grass at night. So the colors would all be very dark with moonlight highlighting, grass approximately 1/2″ long blanketing the base, maybe looking like it was swaying in the breeze.
When trying to figure out how to execute, I came up with the idea of using fur cloth. I got a chunk of some shaggy brown fur cloth and attempted to airbrush it black. That went ok as far as it went, but the fur fibers were too thin to look like grass, even after I gave it a haircut to trim it down to the length I wanted. There was no good way to stick fibers together the make thicker,more grass-like strands. Also, cutting the cloth caused lots of fur to to fall out around the cut edges, which revealed the cloth mesh that holds the fur. After I got the fur painted and stuck to the base and highlighted with dark blue-purple, it ended up looking more like some strange smoke, or maybe fire, but not grass. So I ripped it off tried again with another piece of fur, was dissatisfied with the results again.
There are several tutorials on YouTube about making miniature grass for dioramas, but not the tall field grass I was after. Making a field of short grass with static grass is easy enough, and making long tufts of grass (like what I ended up using in the end) is simple, but have have not yet found any scheme for making anything akin to a field of tall prairie grass.
So what I ended up with was the Reaper in a snowy field, with some tufts of field grass sticking up out of the snow.
