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Empi tries to paint
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Player Character: Gwendolyn Stonewarden

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The dwarven sorceress Gwendolyn gets her magic from the stone and earth of her home, deep within the mountains. She is a dwarf not wearing any visible armor, but a hammer and a shield. It was quite a challenge to find a cool miniature for a female dwarf not wearing armor! But Hasslefree Miniatures had Svala, a young female dwarf without any discernible character role associated with the miniature. It was a perfect fit for Gwen!

Here is the group of adventurers from my D&D 5th Edition Storm King’s Thunder campaign:

Svala (HFD019) from Hasslefree Miniatures was sculpted by Kev White. Kev’s sculpting style is really great, his miniatures are very memorable. I always wanted a good reason to buy some figures from Hasslefree, and this player character was the perfect reason.

Gwen’s player wanted a female dwarf without too much armor, but with a hammer and a shield. I bought the shield separately from Sciboar Miniatures (Dwarves Shields CPSH0009) and attached it later.

Most Reaper dwarfs without armor clearly look like rogues, which was not the look we wanted for Gwen. Terminally Incoherent has a great blog post looking at various manufacturers’ dwarven women miniatures. This list also includes very little female dwarven mages.

For Svala, there are many cool pictures from other painters available online. So let’s have a look at what others did with the miniature:

Character Background

Gwendolyn Stonewarden, a gentle dwarven woman from Citadel Felbarr, discovered her talent to work and shape stone at a very young age.

Gwen was the youngest dwarf to join the stonemason’s guild in recorded history. Her works are famous and popular among the dwarven lords in the North, as she can shape the stone into beautiful forms as only few others can do.

This natural talent to shape the stone not only comes from her artisanal skills, it also comes from Gwen’s supernatural connection to the stone. This “stone magic” is very rare, and the dwarf has no idea why she has was gifted with this kind of magic. She also doesn’t know how she is doing it, but the stone seems to obey her.

A little while ago, there was an accident on a busy construction site Gwen was working on. Her magic went wild. For the first time, the stone did not do what the sorceress wanted it to do. Lives were lost that day.

Gwen laid down her work and chose exile, and to get more in touch with her magic powers to master them.

Preparation/Priming

The miniature from Hasslefree is a bit shorter than the Reaper Miniature dwarves. Even in a standard pose, it has character. I used a simple plastic base for the miniature, so that I could add little stones and vegetation later.

As usual, I used my airbrush to prime the miniature using first black and later white primer from Vallejo.

Painting

Gwen’s player described her to me, and I first photoshopped the artwork above from using different parts of art from the internet. All credit goes to the fantastic artist how created the female dwarf in the first place! All I did was changing some color, so Gwen could wear a green dress and had red hair. This color scheme of course was also the starting point for the miniature.

The shield from Scibor was added at a later stage. I used TMM gold there, but it was tricky to paint as the paint clogged up, and I could not make smooth brush strokes with it. I could have tried using another paint, but I kept the first try. It looks good enough, as long as you don’t look to close 😉

Overall, I am happy with the miniature. Except for the eyes! I think they are too big (and too anime) in retrospective, and now I would make them smaller.

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