Thursday 30 July 2020

Excellent Miniatures - 10mm elf scale comparison

I recently received a package of sample 10mm miniatures from a German company, Excellent Miniatures. For full disclosure, I paid for most of the postage, but I did not pay for the miniatures. The package contained an assortment of figures from different ranges that they currently sell.

In this post, I am going to concentrate on the two ranges of elves that were in the sample - Elven Nobles and Elves of the Wood. I believe both ranges have been produced by Forest Dragon on patreon and Excellent Miniatures have a license to 3D print and sell them commercially. 

Here you can see the Excellent Miniatures elves alongside examples of other assorted (nominally) 10mm miniatures. The first thing to note is that the quality of the sculpting is quite remarkable and the printing leaves them clean and crisp.The Noble Elves (on foot) are slightly smaller than all the others, but the comparison is a little unfair as these examples are not on the strip base that they would ordinarily be printed on. That strip base would raise them up a couple of mm. Even so, the Noble Elves are closer in size to Warmaster figures and the historical ranges of Pendraken and Magister Militum than those companies' fantasy lines.

Here you can see the Noble Elves between Magister and Pendraken ranges. Even with a strip base, they would still be a tad smaller, but the beauty of 3D printing files is that Stephan at Excellent Miniatures has said that they would be happy to adjust the size if required. It should be noted that colour scheme is for my wee boy's blue-skinned Night Elf army - akin to Dark Elves, but with less nudity and S&M because he is only nine... 

The Elves of the Wood stag-riders are pretty special; special enough for me to place an order so I can paint up a small army for Fantastic Battles. The sample stag-riders were printed in a quick-print test plastic and were rather brittle and I lost two antlers in transit, but the commercial prints will use the more robust plastic that most of the rest of my sample bag were printed in.

Finally, I wanted to see an example of how they take paint, so I painted up one of the Noble Elf command figures as a Night Elf Captain. She is obviously smaller but so much more detailed than her peers. While I love Magister and Pendraken, I've always found their elves lacking in ... elfishness. Magister elves are robust rather than fine, while Pendraken elves are really tall and a bit stiff. I have to say that these 3D printed elves are rather exquisite. 

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