I had a love-in-first sight experience when I first saw a box featuring a fully painted Lord Aquilor on it at Asgard Games in Houston. I was playing a Commander game with about 7 people and saw Lord Aquilor on a shelf by pure chance, and knew I had to have it somehow.
I’m very easily enchanted by things that, in retrospect, strike me as completely random. However, when it comes to things like Magic the Gathering, DnD, Warhammer, and Pokemon cards, maybe it’s not random at all. Maybe, small and detailed figurines contain a kind of magic, something precious and precise, that I can’t help but love and appreciate. Especially as an artist who makes work at large and small scales.
In 2021 I first had the idea to combine “Christmas Village”-style figurines with Warhammer figurines. I could only walk by the Christmas diorama art at Michael’s so many times before wanting to make a diorama of my own, and I also had some Warhammer figurines that I had been meaning to paint, so I combined the forces of these two worlds to create what I call Warhammer Winter Wonderland, a diorama in my house on my art table.
I’ve decided to do this every year, because it brings me joy to set up little scenarios between Santa and Lord Aquilor, and also because my mom thought it was funny.
Here are photos from Warhammer Winter Wonderland 2022
If you’re so inclined, here is what you need to make your own Warhammer Winter Wonderland!
Warhammer figurines - the sky’s the limit! I used only figurines that I had primed in my Warhammer Winter Wonderland. There’s no reason that any kind of figurine couldn’t be used for this kind of decoration. You’ll notice the figurines in my diorama aren’t painted very much - it’s not for lack of wanting to, I just straight ran out of time!
Snow - I chose cottony/fiberous-style snow for my terrain but you could definitely make other choices for your snow terrain. I found the cottony snow was a bit hard to work with, it can be a bit difficult for me to evenly place figurines with this style of snow. When I make Warhammer Winter Wonderland 2023, I will probably use a different type of snow.
River feature - if you have a bridge in your Winter Wonderland, you might like to use blue paper of different kinds to make a river or lake feature.
Christmas village figurines - I personally picked these up at Michaels. The large buildings are from the brand Lemax. I ordered a few of the other background buildings in July and congratulated myself on my deal-finding ability.
Background drop - for the background of my photos I made a canvas with a thin wash of blue paint for the sky.
Camera - for my photos, I used an iPhone 14 on normal camera mode and also portrait mode.