Wildlings

I bought all the Wildlings from Dark Sword Miniatures’ Song of Ice and Fire collection. There are twelve of them, some generic warriors and some named characters from the books. I had wanted these miniatures for a long time already, but now I finally found an excuse to actually order them. They will be used as dunlendings in my One Ring RPG campaign that is set in Rohan.

The miniatures are very finely detailed and most have really dynamic poses. Painting them was once again really enjoyable, as is usually the case with Dark Sword’s products. Their miniatures are always of really exceptional quality.

I chose to use a very limited palette to make all of those individuals look like they could be from the same culture that has somewhat limited supply of colourful fabrics. Aside from metals and basic skin tones, I chose to use beige, dark brown, white, black and bluish black almost exclusively. A couple of early experiments have more reddish brown and some miniatures have little colourful details.

I varied the amount of shadow and highlight, for example occassionally highlighting beige to almost white and sometimes washing and glazing it to look like yellowish brown leather. The same with bluish black, sometimes I let it go all the way to blue greys, sometimes I left it almost black.

The hair colours are more varied than what Tolkien describes dunlendings having. Of course, Ygritte and Tormund should be redheads, but I also painted some blondes because only black hair would soon have become boring to paint.

The bases have white sand as snow; suitable for wildlings beyond the Wall, but also for dunlendings living in the vales of the White or Misty Mountains. The sand as snow looks a bit too coarse, but is OK for me.