Wee Free Folk

Over the past few years I’ve bought a lot of miniatures, from a lot of different sources. I try to support small or new companies, because I want them to do well (and I like having a variety of different things to paint). And sometimes, they’ll throw in a freebie – often something small; possibly something miscast, overstock, or just to encourage me to start a new collection. Here’s a couple (and one that I bought, that kind of fits with the group).

Starting with one of Tom Meier’s ‘Ballerina Fairy Princess Infantry’, available from Ral Partha Legacy under the Thunderbolt Mountain: Savage and Sparkle range. The story behind these is that Meier’s children, Nora and Theo, come up with the concepts and Tom sculpts them. This one is obviously further inspired by Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’ statue, with added weapons – the ‘throwing star’ hidden behind her back is a particularly nice touch.

I painted the skirt and wings with what were at the time ‘new’ (and are now old) Citadel contrast paints. I’m not sure I used them completely correctly, but I did get quite an intense, bright colour out of them.

This next one wasn’t free; it’s just a Citadel ‘Armoured Mite’ from the ‘Chaos Familiars’ range in the original lead. They were re-released in Finecast resin a few years ago, but I’m not sure I completely trust that at such a small scale, and I don’t really want to buy a full box of all the surviving familiar sculpts. Even if it is an interesting (and varied) range that I think could be a lot of fun to paint.

Speaking of paint, I gave him a fairly simple colour scheme – mostly silver for the body with shoulder, elbow, and knee pads in alternating blue-and-orange. At the time I hadn’t used orange much, but more recently it’s been one of the main accent colours for my genestealer cult, so it’s not quite the breath of fresh air that it was at the time. For the base I just used the same formula that I’d previously used for my chaos dwarfs, because this guy is chaotic and dwarf-ish.

Last up for today is a heavily armoured dwarf. I’m not even sure where this came from, but the slotta tab is printed with the text ‘Champion of Gollnir’, so after a bit of Googling I think it’s an Avatars of War miniature. It’s not my favourite sculpt – it’s got neither the grit and grime of old Citadel nor the uniqueness of, say, their modern ‘Kharadron Overlords’ range. But he kind of works as a proxy for one of my D&D characters, and although it’s hard to see in the photograph I’m particularly happy with the freehand runes on the cloak.

I don’t think I’d anticipated uploading these all to one blog post, so there’s no family photo. There’s nothing I can do about that for now because I’m away from home this week, but maybe I can remember to add one last bonus photo later. Time will tell.

Next up in miniatures: something more monstrous.