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Recently I've been toying around with some minor amateur 3d modeling projects, and something fell into my lap unexpectedly that I've been kicking around in my head for a while.

See, I have always really loved the aesthetic of the Harlequins. The very first time I was exposed to 40k at all, I walked into my friend's house while he was playing a wargame that appeared to be world war 2 soldiers vs space aliens, and then one of my friends took a unit from the side of the table and put it down next to his transport vehicle, and my other friend said "welp, my guys are definitely going to get killed by those alien space clowns."

Immediately, I was intrigued by this setting that somehow included anime battlesuits, world war 2 soldiers, and space clowns with chainsaws on the same tabletop as part of the core rules. And make no mistake, I wanted to play those space clowns. But at the time, they weren't a full army just one unit, the models were crazy expensive, and I didn't like how the basic eldar units looked at all, just the harlequins with their cool commedia del arte masks and freehanded colorful paint schemes and mohawks.

Eldar have always been kind of love-hate for me, I love the way the Wraith units look, I love the core concept behind the aspect warriors and I love the way some aspect warriors look, but the basic trooper being kind of a power ranger wearing a cone hat and holding a weird geometrically shaped space gun....eh, not a fan. So when GW did make harlequins in 7th, obviously I got into them really hard, and eventually started branching into the other eldar factions but generally I'd convert them to match my existing harlequin army (some examples below). My biggest, most ambitious project was a harlequin themed wraithlord, with tons of custom sculpted greenstuff bits, and kitbashing, and freehanding.

The general themes of my wraith units in this harlequin themed pan-eldar fiasco are based on the marionettes my grandmother collected when I was a kid. The big smooth heads let me do fun expressive freehanded faces and the gangly limbs lend themselves to making them look like puppets.

But I never tried tackling a wraithknight. By the time I was doing eldar it was post-8th edition when Wraithknights were super bad ruleswise, and the collossal amount of effort it took to do the clowned up wraithlord coupled with the fact that every idea I had for the knight was super over the top and crazy (at one point I had the idea of hanging a theater curtain off of the titanic wraithshield and having the wraithknight kneeling down and performing a puppet show with a space marine I would cut up and turn into a marionette dangling from the wraithlord's free hand.

But now I have a 3d printer, and one of my patreon subscriptions did a run of sort of more sinister, gnarly wraith units themed around the Predator, with a lot of cyber-dreadlocks, fanged faces with the long heads reminiscent of the tall predator forehead, and lots of forearm blades and shoulder cannons. And that seemed like the perfect starting point to making my long-awaited Clown Knight.

The first step was to find some good props. I had a few Harlequin STLs (masks for variety and weapons for giving me extras beyond the 2 arms that would come in the troupe kits for each weapon) and I looked online and found someone had made STLs for a tarot card deck. That and the partial skull face that was already sculpted into the alternate Wraithknight stl I had gave me the idea of doing a sort of new orleans voodoo skeleton Baron Saturday theme for my wraithknight. I also grabbed a model of the titanic wraithshield to make the model more accurate to WYSIWYG as the original stl sculpt had two sets of forearm blades.

First, I embedded tarot cards into the shield, and used the free hand balled into a fist to put a scaled-up version of a shadowseer staff, to give him kind of a circus ringleader scepter. Then I used the draw and inflate tool in Meshmixer to give the head that classic Harlequin grinning skull mask, reminiscent of those converted wraithlords people used to make with the old metal bike mask. Threw a top hat on there, and for an added accent I stuck the Death card from the tarot deck into the hat. The hat is also hollow on top and you can still see the top of the wraithlord's head inside, I figure because it probably works sort of like an antenna, to allow the spirtiseer to communicate with the wraithknight. I like it because the Baron Saturday skeleton is often shown with kind of a raggedy, beat-up suit, and you often see old beat up top hats with the round tops knocked out.

Then rather than going with the usual tabards that wraithknights have between their legs, because I want him to kind of look like he's wearing a three-piece suit, I sculpted ragged suit-tails into the bottom of the armor on the torso, and gave him a big old harlequin mask as a codpiece on the front. That looked so good, I put a few more harlequin masks on in place of some of the larger Eldar Gems TM.

Lastly, I pulled all the parts into meshmixer to look at the overall pose and vibe, and I determined that I kind of created a piece where the tarot cards I originally wanted to be central to the design would be massively overshadowed....because I had put a top hat on a wraithknight. You're just gonna look at the top hat and you'll never see the tarot cards embedded into the shield like he's a villain of the week on Yu Gi Oh.

My new plan is to add slightly larger versions of the tarot cards coming off of the wraithshield and swirling up to the top of the scepter so that they're physically supported in two places. The motion of the model would be that he's stepping forward and twirling his Harlequin domino shield in front of him like a magician twirling his cape, distracting his target while he extends the sneaky forearm blades.

Well, those are certainly space clowns!! Good job!

Fantastic work here. I'd really love to try some virtual sculpting. Though I'd have to say I don't love the hat. It'd be fine on a human unit but it doesn't look Eldar enough. The head looks great without it, looks Eldar and alien and death clown but the human fashion item just kills it. Maybe an Eldar-looking something that recalls the shape of the hat but isn't just a giant top hat would work better.