Santa Claus from brother

[Revell-Fan]

HO-HO-HO!!!




After a looong hiatus I have built another paper model. This cutie was itching me heavily since I first saw it on the web.

It is the Santa Claus from brother. They have a really nice collection of models which are not as sophisticated as the ones from Canon but they are all free and provide fun for all ages. I first encountered their website while I was looking for new Halloween goodies:

https://creativecenter.brother.eu/family-center

Even though all models are free you have to register to get certain ones with this Santa being part of these. That bugged me a lot. Why registering to get one particular free model whereas the majority of the other free models offered can be obtained without registration? What was weird was that some models which were blocked in Germany could be grabbed without problems on the English version of the website. Hm. Doesn't made much sense to me. Ah well. I bit the bullett and registered. It was easier than I thought and so far I haven't experienced any negative side effects of that yet. Earth is still rotating, "The Last Jedi" had its successful premiere and weather is still bad here, in short: business as usual. The only difference: My models folder got a tad bigger. But that's not too bad.

Well then. Enough talk, on with the build!

I started with the coat which consists of two parts:





You can see a misalignment at the bottom:



I noticed that the curvature was no longer correct if I had matched the texture. In addition, I did not know how a change would affect the rest of the build. So I left it for the time being.

Next was the collar. It was pre-shaped with a round pen and glued to the front and back of the coat.



The arms proved to be a bit difficult to attach. There are no alignment marks and no hints of how to attach the flat pieces. I pre-shaped them using the pen and glued them in place in two spots.



The instructions illustrates how the parts are to be attached.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The legs are pretty simple. They consist of two tubes.



The design of the feet is a bit special:



Everything begins with this weird shape. The front piece is glued down to the flaps. One side is longer than the other and wraps around it.



I used the seamline at the back of the leg to attach the foot. Like at the front one of the back strips is longer and wraps around the seam.





I carefully bent them into shape after this pic.



I applied a drop of glue at the top of the legs and glued them together. Once the glue had dried I put another drop of glue at the "hips" and attached them to the coat. I grabbed inside the body through the neck opening to hold everything in place. Again, there were no alignment marks. You are free to adjust the position of the legs and the body because of this.





Some views inside: As you can see there are no supports whatsoever holding the pieces in place. Everything is held together by drops of glue.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Now we have a Santa body but no Santa head yet. That will change.





The beard is cut free and slightly bent outwards to give it a three-dimensional appearance. I love that friendly face!



Again: An alignment problem, but on the back of the head (meaning, you will never notice ).

The hat is a simple cone:





Attaching the cone was again a bit of a lucky game because there was absolutely nothing telling you where to attach it. Glue was applied to the tabs and the hat was pushed through the neck opening inside the head. I took the instructions as a guide which went well. Take care that the hat is attached symmetrically or it will look off (unless you want it to look like that, of course).



The neck was a simple tube:





Yep, you guess it: no markings again...



... but miraculously it found its designated place.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Santa's Slay, Episode 23: The headless Santa.





The neck was glued to the rectangular piece of the collar. A drop of glue on the upper front of the coat attached the beard.

Et voilà: Santa Claus in all his glory:











My findings:

Pros: This model is really nice. My mom loves it. It is not too big and not too small. High potential for customizing. Fast assembly, no fiddly parts.
Cons: Some misaligned textures. No alignment marks. The single parts are held together by drops of glue only. It looks as if it was designed by an artist who prefers a hot glue gun to traditional tube glue. Watching the instructions carefully is imperative. Beginners may be in trouble because the parts are attached to one another without a solid base; they are swimming about till the glue has dried.

Nevertheless the look of the finished model compensates for the surprises you encounter during assembly. There are a deer and a sleigh available; maybe I'll tackle them, too.

Thanks for watching and have fun and enjoy!

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

This looks very cool! Thank you for sharing this with us!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Sooo, I have tampered with the template a bit and corrected the transition of the texture at the edges of the coat and the head. I also reduced the size to 70 % and combined the two coat parts to one piece. The first one is the Santa as designed, the second figure shows the revision:



And this is how they look together with the big one:



The board is just a simple rectangular piece of corrugated card wrapped in wrapping paper. Everything got wrapped up in cellophane with a small Christmas card by Canon papercraft on top.

It's amazing to see that the figures can be built that easily and pretty fast. The three have been sent to a new and good home by now; needless to say that everyone who saw them mentioned how cute they were.

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

These are indeed cute!
You could also make an internal "body" section (that would fit snug inside the main body part) where you can "hide" candies inside.