As noted back when I started painting this model, Raging Heroes‘ Jinx was a gift for someone. There’s a little story behind it, though – which I’ll share now. Back when the RH KS1 pledge manager was a thing, I asked a question in the chat box and was answered by Mirielle. Now at times I’ve been both a strong supporter and also a strong critic of RH (sometimes at the same time), and not been shy to take the piss, either – so this led to a couple of interesting and quite amicable chats over a couple of days.

In those conversations, we talked about what we do a bit, and in there I mentioned how I worked with a young lady with ASD who is also completely in love with cats, to the point where she writes a blog based around my own cat. Mirielle made a very kind gesture, and offered to send out a 54mm sculpt of Jinx as a gift for this young lady. Fast forward to roughly a year later and the last wave of RH KS stuff arrived, including Jinx.

There was a bit of mold slip, which I was (mostly) able to clean up on a fairly tight timeframe, as I was attempting to get it finished before the 4th of December, when the young lady finished up and moved on. Since work becomes an actual nightmare at that time of year – as I’ve referenced before – it didn’t get completed – cleaning the Trollcast resin just to get started was quite problematic, but I made arrangements with her parents to catch up with them and her over the start of the New Year. This gave me a chance to keep working on the model.

Since Jinx is theoretically one of those hairless cats, there’s no fur texture. I decided not to worry about the “lore” but went instead for colours that would be acceptable in animation – something that would stand out – and so Jinx became a shorthair with purple fur. Highlighting and shading was going to be an issue with a model this big on a deadline, and I’m still far from confident with an airbrush, so I went with a very careful drybrush and wash combination, which seems to have come up quite nicely.

With purple, gold/brass was an easy choice for a nice contrasting colour for Jinx’ jewellery. I’m sure gold jewellery could have had something to do with the choice of purple for Jinx’ fur, but at this point I can’t recall.

The faint texture of the resin gives enough of an impression of very short fur, certainly on the 54mm Jinx. Basing was a bit of a quandry – I certainly wasn’t going to add sand and flock or tufts, since this is a shelf ornament rather than a wargame model. In the end I went for classic black. I did a little more touch-up after these photos were taken, and varnish was applied immediately afterwards. Gloss varnish on the gems, eyes, etc, yesterday morning.

In the end, the large details were quite nice to paint, and not one of those painful models at all. I checked the RH webstore and it seems that the 54mm Jinx isn’t available at all. I think perhaps the 54mm Mascots were exclusives limited to the Kickstarter campaign/backers?

Most importantly of all, when I presented the model to her yesterday she was absolutely delighted and it was immediately decided that Jinx is an Egyptian Cat. Her parents were also touched by the story behind it, so a warm thank you again to Mirielle and Raging Heroes from the young lady, her family as well as myself.