Monday, February 1, 2010

Dwarf Ranger


Huzzah, an actual mini for Mik's Minis in 2010! I had said I had a fig on my work desk that just needed basing, and well here he is. I had picked up some of Gale Force 9's snow flock a couple of weeks ago to use for my Viking project, so I thought I'd try it out. I know you can use detergent or whatever, but it was kind of an impulse buy.

Since we actually have had some snow, a rare thing around here, I thought I'd combine the two. Indoors, when I applied the GF9 to the fig's base I wasn't too thrilled, it looked like he was standing in salt, but looking at these pics, it's identical to real snow.


The fig itself is from the defunct Rackham metal line and was one of the Tir-Na-Bor Dwarves. This fig, like the others, is nothing short of amazing. The detail and style put into these is great and I hope my meager paint job can convey this and do the fig justice. Simply put, it was a fun figure to paint, and kind of hard to screw up when you're done because it already looks so good!


It was tricky to paint much so green but in different shades...

The title says 'Dwarf Ranger' and thanks to the massive slab of a sword, made from a precious green stone, I went with the name 'Jade'. There's a backstory about Dwarves named Jade carrying around large, 'final fantasy' style swords in my book that goes way back, but I'll spare you the details. Anyway, I whipped this character up as part of a Savage Worlds game we played, set in the world of Warhammer Fantasy.

It's really two great tastes that go great together. The richly detailed world of Warhammer Fantasy gives players and GMs a lot of room to kick around in, then add a great system like Savage Worlds and you've got a pretty sweet setup. We only played the one game, but I'm hoping for more, especially since I painted up a fig for it! Also, since it's the Warhammer world, there's a hint of a plot twist that the sword might actually contain a vein or two of Warpstone...

9 comments:

  1. Meager ? Not a word I would use .... looks great ! Have you tried adding some dead vegetation, rocks or some new grass poking through as if spring was coming ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks very nice to me. When you said dwarf ranger I started to think of my Chainmail minis from WoTC about 8 years ago. I have so many of those and they would work great in a roleplaying setting, but no time for that.

    So you got some of the snow. I had to drive down to southeast Missouri to be there by saturday morning so I had to leave the night before I wanted to. Still got hit with some of the snow before arriving. Then I got stuck in a driveway where it took like 6 tries to get out then stuck trying to get out of a neighborhood street for another six tries. Very annoying.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I hope the backstory is a good one, because Jade is an awfully stripper-esque name for a Dwarf Ranger...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice work on the mini though. I was never a fan of most of the Rackham stuff - too over the top for my tastes - but the painting is nice and the snow looks good.

    ReplyDelete
  5. To the comments about the fig, thanks! I said "meager" but to be honest I did try pretty darn well to do my best. With RPG figs it's always nice because you can put a couple of days into the fig and not have to worry about the other 29 Dwarves that go with the unit or whatever. I should've taken a closeup of the face, I put extra care into the eyes which are supposed to be looking over his right shoulder.

    @Jmezz: Good idea on the vegetation, I think with my vikings, ahem, I'll do just that.

    @Brad: Yeah, you'd think it was the end times with all the hysteria with the coming "blizzard", it just turned out we got a couple of inches at most.

    @Brian: I know, totally lame name right? It came to me in a dream years ago, literally, featuring a Dwarf ranger carrying a huge, green sword, so I figured I had to use it, yeah? My subconscious told me to.

    ReplyDelete
  6. From the pics, it looks like the sheen on the sword is the same as the rest of the model. You might want to go over the sword with some brush on gloss to give it that polished stone look you usually associate with jade.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Good call. I spray all my figs with a can of generic "clear" coat from the spray paint aisle. Which is what I did here, but didn't follow up. What I usually do next is follow up with Testor's Dull Cote, which this one still needs.

    After that, I have a bottle of high gloss I'll brush on the blade. I won't repost pics, but you're local, so just look next time you're over!

    ReplyDelete