Welcome to the third unboxing in our Shieldwolf Miniatures week!
After seeing Shamikebab play with his Orc Standard Bearer and Merkeysa get to grips with his Mounted General/Warrior Priest, it's my turn. I was offered the choice between a Wizard, a Mounted General and an Orc and, as I'm not an Orc person, that was the order of my preference.
With that in mind, I was rather happy when the Sorceress appeared in the post.
The packaging looks a little large on her, but now I've seen that the same packaging was used for both of the other miniatures, it now makes more sense as she is the smallest of the three we were sent. Even then, she arrived safely and was snug enough in the packaging to stay sat in the top corner when I tipped the package up.
She's a resin mini, which are cast in-house by Shieldwolf themselves and she feels like she is either 28mm heroic, like Games Workshop, or 30mm in scale. No measuring, she just feels bigger than similar mages from Hasslefree and Heresy which are 28mm.
She's a one piece miniature, which is great, given the dynamics of the model, and is cast in a light grey resin.
She came with a 20mm square base, which she fits nicely on diagonally. This faces her forwards towards one edge, and allows the flame spiral to come across from her right to left.
She's dressed in a knee length robe and could be painted with trousers on (or not) as shown in the box art. That, along with her proportions, would lead me to call her a "Believable Female Miniature", to use a term that Annie The Dice Bag Lady uses to determine what goes into her store. It's an interesting discussion but one for another day as I'm getting distracted.
Now that I've shown off how the miniature actually looks in the flesh, I'm moving to Black and White to grab more of the detail.
The first thing I noticed was the fire spiral - it's the key element to the piece. The first thing that sprang to mind was how much it looked like Mercury from Guild Ball:
The key difference with the fire, is that it appears to have been drawn from a pouch, indicating that this wizardly type needs something to kick start her spells and that she can't just conjure flame out of nothing. This leads you to looking at her belt and, sure enough, there are multiple pouches attached to a couple of belts along with a sharp looking dagger.
Her face is youthful and fairly angular which gives you a nice surface to choose your own level of flesh tone and any make up you might want to apply.
I mentioned earlier that she was wearing robes, but as you look closer, you realise that there is more to it that that. She has a hooded robe on, but also what looks like a shawl over her shoulders. It turns out from closer inspection (that I'm doing now, while writing, as I missed this while taking photos) that the shawl is actually part of her tabard that follows the line of her hood and down her front under her belts.
I had to hunt for quite a while before I found an air bubble, with a few in the base of her boot but the only one that I found anywhere on display was lower down on the back of her robe, and it was tiny. Mold lines are a similar story. If you look for them, they're there - along part of a boot and the blade of her dagger, but they're not prominent and should be easily removed without doing any damage to the fantastic level of detail.
In her own right, she's a great mini, perfect for anyone wanting to add a female human wizard or druid to their ranks for either an army, skirmish warband or as a character for a D&D/RPG campaign.
What she is though, in my eyes, is a great example of the quality of both the resin casting from Shieldwolf and the quality of the female miniatures they produce which is perfect, given that the main aim of their current Kickstarter is to cover the cost of creating units of plastic Shield Maidens.
While the Sorceress is not currently available in the Kickstarter, she can be picked up from the Shieldwolf Miniatures website.
The Shieldwolf Minitures Kickstarter - War is Coming: Shieldmaidens vs Orcs is currently live and runs until 11th February.
