The Frost Giant’s Daughters? Hornblower 15mm Shield Maidens

These marvellous little minis came to my attention last year when Oz sculptor Mathias started posting works in progress on his Instagram account (@macefaceminiatures). 15mm isn’t my main scale, but I’d enjoyed putting together some Wiglaf and Forged in Battle minis for a recent project and was willing to have a look. Nick at Northstar passed on some samples which, I regret to say, sat on the painting table half finished as I got distracted with real life and other such stuff.

The Christmas holidays were a chance to get these finished off and based, and I’m glad I did. The sculpts have more than a nod of Copplestone about them and match well with his work on the Barbarica and Wiglaf ranges.

I confess that I was slightly intimidated by Steve Dean’s superb paint jobs on these exact minis and decided to focus on what I do, which is putting together units to get onto the gaming table. I opted to go for something along the lines of a ‘slap chop’ approach – using Contrasts/ Speedpaints to add colour over a pre-shaded base layer.

After a quick clean up, mine were sprayed black and then dry-brushed with mid grey and white acrylics to provide a graduated base. This didn’t work quite as well as when I’ve used it on 28mm minis, as some areas (especially faces) were so small that they didn’t pick up much of the grey/ white paint. This resulted in a bit of fixing up later on, where I did some manual highlights onto these areas with traditional acrylics.

I failed to take step by step photos, but the sequence was:

1. Black undercoat followed by grey and white dry brush.
2. ‘Colouring in’ main areas with GW Contrasts/ Army Painter Sppedpaints: Skin (AP Crusader Skin); Hair (GW Nazdreg Yellow); Leather/ Boots (GW Snakebite Leather, GW Gore Grunta Fur, GW Gagarak’s Sewer); Horns (GW Skeleton Horde); Spears/ Bows (GW Snakebite Leather); Helmets/ Armour/ Blades (AP Broadsword Silver).
3. Clothing – blue was the theme here! (All GW Contrasts: I used a whole mixture of Talassar Blue, Ultramarines Blue, Celestium Blue, Gryph Charger Grey, with a few leaders with Luxion Purple).
4. This was followed by some light dry brushing with Vallejo Iraqi Sand to bring up detail and touching up darker areas with various acrylics as described above. It wasn’t an exact science! Some clothing had trimmings painted on, and I highlighted and added some runic designs to the banners.
5. Shields were painted acrylic black – I wanted a contrast with the bold blue clothing.
6. Following a coat of spray varnish (Winsor and Newton Professional Matt), I added the metallic highlights. Army Painter Shining Silver was used to dot in rivets on the shields, as well as to highlight all the iron and steel. The few areas of bronze/ gold were done with my usual technique: Vallejo Brass base, wash of brown ink, highlight with Vallejo Gold.

I’m planning to use these for Midgard Heroic Battles; 80mm x 40mm bases worked very well indeed for my 15mm early medieval collection, and has become a common standard amongst 15mm players, so I went the same way with these.

The bases are 2mm round-cornered MDF from Warbases, with the heroes being based on a 20mm and 25mm circles. Frosty bases were the order of the day using Gamer’s Grass winter and beige tufts and some Woodland Scenics snow scatter.

This also gave me the excuse to use the new Winter Book from Jon Hodgson Backdrops for the photo shoot! These are the A3 versions which gave me more options on the wide shots. I’m absolutely thrilled with how good these are (though I need to raise my photography game this year!)

Having got these finished, I can now work on the next project, though I hear that some Shield Maiden cavalry are just around the corner, so there may be more to come very soon!

You can find the Hornblower 15mm range at Northstar, along with the Gamer’s Grass tufts.