Harlequins - The Path of Gracelessness

Kicking off 2022 with a strange little project - a slightly crazy idea that I wanted to get done in one quick streak before the inspiration vanished. Here's a small squad of Aeldari Harlequins. More pictures and background below the jump.

Pierrot and Harlequin, 1888, by Paul Cezanne

The official GW Harlequins are based on the figure of their namesake, Harlequin (or Arlecchino), a character from the traditional Commedia dell'arte, from which we get many modern images of clowns. There's several other characters in this canon. You may be familiar with Pierrot, or at least what he looks like. He's the boy in the oversized white clothes and hat, sometimes with his face painted white. Some modern images of clowns are based on his style. I'll save you from further coulrophobia by not posting any more reference images here 😊

So this project is about making Harlequins that take after Pierrot's style instead of Harlequin's. These weirdos follow the Path of Gracelessness (its true name is difficult to translate from Aeldari, but means something like "The Path of Winning While Losing" or "The Path of Succeeding Through Failure"). The Harlequins of this Path cultivate a movement discipline that appears clumsy, but is of course precisely coordinated via their Aeldari reflexes. These Harlequins appear to amble, trip, roll, and somersault improbably through enemy gunfire, bullets appearing to miss them by sheer coincidence. Each stumble is in fact coordinated with inhuman athleticism. But more formidable still is their use of holoprojectors.

Thanks to personal holoprojections, the Harlequins of the Graceless Path are able to misdirect and fool their opponents. A Harlequin might appear to unluckily fail to dodge an enemy shot, the bullet blasting an improbably large, perfectly circular hole directly through their chest. But in reality, they have survived the shot (thanks to some theatrical misdirection and special effects) and will proceed to tear lumps out of their unlucky opponent. Other holoprojection tricks include apparent bilocation, bodily distortion, vanishing into impossibly small gaps in the terrain, and so on.

Their grotesque masks are crafted (or grown) from synth-flesh, possibly melded permanently onto their real face. In most other respects they're conventional Harlequins - you could think of them as adhering to a specific, unconventional, school of Harlequinism.

The base kit is the Blood Bowl Wood Elves team. It's a nice kit; very good for athletically-posed anatomy. The monopose design allowed the sculptors to make the musculature look very realistic. The full-body body-socks they're wearing are also convincingly sculpted, with nice folds and visible stretches. It was cleanly compatible with Harlequin weaponry - they were actually very easy to convert. The main challenge was actually removing some of the most Wood Elfy details - the sculpts are so clean that any spots where I scratched away details are quite visible.

The heads are all sculpted from Aves Apoxie Sculpt, which I like for its value. The Wood Elf kit comes with several faceless heads that I removed the mohawk hair from and smoothed over the scalps of. A bit of extra fuss, but it meant I could keep their sculpted ears (no way I was going to try sculpting such a delicate detail myself). With the heads cleaned up, I drilled and glued in a piece of trimmed paperclip for each nose, and then built up a mask-face from Apoxie using the nose as an anchor. I was deliberately crude with the face sculpting - I wanted them to look a little fleshy and "off". The hats were also Aves - I made cones, left them to set, and then trimmed each end. I also rolled up a load of bobbles to glue in place and then paint black.

This last guy is my favourite of the bunch. The Blood Bowl model is posed to be running in for a catch (like I said, great athletic poses) with his head turned back. I turned his head to face forwards and now he looks like he's about to turn a somersault. Kind of a creepy thing for a clown warrior to do!

OOOOO

So this is my first project of the year. I'm happy to have got the project done and finished within about two weeks of first having the idea. Feels good to have a completed project to start the year off. Next up I'm going to be revisiting a couple projects from last year and the year before and refining them / adding some new stuff.

Thanks for reading!

Hek