The Fire Giants are not complete without their queen. So for this final Fire Giant post, I present Reapers new version of Vanja, Fire Giant Queen. There is no official artwork for Duke Zaltos wife, Duchess Brimskarda, but I think Vanja represents her perfectly for my Storm King’s Thunder campaign.

Vanja, Fire Giant Queen (huge) (77613) was sculpted by Chris Lewis. The original version was created by Werner Klocke. Both are based/use the Fire Giant Queen artwork below. You can already see how much jewelry the Queen wears, including many rings, bands, bracelets, gold adornments, and red jewels. She also uses an impressive black double-spear, so this queen isn’t defenseless at all.

Unfortunately, Duchess Brimskarda doesn’t get any official artwork in the Storm King’s Thunder adventure. Instead, there is much fan art out there depicting her. In my campaign, she didn’t play too great a role. But my players encountered her in the fortress of Ironslag, and with the miniature of Vanja, I was prepared for that!

Basing and Priming

Although Vanja’s miniature is a bit smaller than the other huge versions of Reaper’s Fire Giants, she still fits well on a 3-inch base. Like for the other Fire Giants, I used a resin flagstone base to pin the figure on. Priming was done using an airbrush with Vallejo primer, first with black and then with white primer.

Painting

Again, I used the same color recipes as for the other Fire Giants, i.e. the gray skin tone, the red-orange hair, the black metallic armor and the gold/red for the jewelry. That means different washes (black for the armor, red for the hair, brown for the gold) to build contours, drybrushing the edges etc.

This figure had a lot more hair than the others, and the Bones material sculpt was way better than the original Vanja miniature. I remember that the old miniature’s hair was more of a hassle to paint, but it was great this time. The same is true for Vanja’s face – she has less of a snarl and a more pronounced nose compared to the old Vanja, which was easier to paint for me.

When painting the red jewels, I felt a bit lazy. I could have done the whole recipe, as in painting them in dark red, adding different tones of red on the opposite side and adding a light reflex to simulate a translucent shiny gem. This can be seen in this tutorial. Instead, I wanted the rubies to be very bright. So I just painted them in a bright red and covered them in gloss medium, so they would appear shiny to the viewer by themselves.

Like her husband, the Fire Giant Queen also wears a cloak. The texture looks almost identical to the King’s cloak, so I assumed it would be made of dragon scales as well. I wanted Vanja to have a different colored cloak, and I chose black. I think a red cloak would not have been ideal for contrast because of the orange-red hair.

Overall, I am quite happy with the result!

Finally, let me show you all of Reaper’s new Fire Giants together as a group!

Here is a comparison with the old (non-huge) Reaper Bones Fire Giant version from Vanja: