Hasslefree Miniatures: Sana Unboxing

Hasslefree has long been one of my guilty pleasures. Despite my painting backlogs, metal mountains and resin stock piles, I always manage to justify buying a Hasslefree product. For those of you not familiar with HFM (Hasslefree Miniatures), they are a UK based miniature range sculpted by industry veteran Kev White and they produce a variety of figures for most gaming genres. I believe they are currently celebrating their 9th year as a company. Today I received one of their latest Fantasy offerings: Sana, a female barbarian sporting a Red Sonia esque scale mail bikini and wielding a large axe, don't get much more fantasy than that!

Sana is cast in a blue resin, and I have to say after months of poor mass produced casts from larger companies, it is a breath of fresh air to receive a piece that looks unblemished. One of the major gripes I have is the need to repair excessively bad casts and scrape huge mould lines from poor casting. while YES it can be argued that it's all 'part of the procedure', the sheer volume of poor offerings from GW's infamous Finecast, Forge World's shift to Finecast and also Privateer Presses' plastic figures have left me more demoralised than enthused about a product. There are people out there who will argue that their is nothing wrong, with the system but look at HFM cast first and then compare it to your hole riddled Space Marine with half the should pad melted off..

I love the crisp sculpting on this figure, each scale looks sharp and the fur cloak has come out nice and textured too, the flesh areas are all smooth and all the muscle definition has come out perfectly. My only small comment would be the axe head, I would have liked to have seen something a little more detailed such as engravings, but thats a personal preference that does not detract from the figure's final appearance in all honesty. By far my favourite part of the miniature is the boobs! *joking* the face, I am a 'face guy' which is why I am also a fan of Werner Klockes', I have far too many unpainted figures from the Reaper range due to Klockes facial sculpting style.  Like Klocke, Kev produces some great female faces and Sana is no exception, he has done a great job here and part of me hopes that this figure makes it to the 40mm or more range. 

And thats about it, my humble thoughts on HFM's Sana figure. She now joins the 'to be painted queue' in June, I am thinking about whether to just have her as an independent figure or perhaps use her as part of a larger project such as a barbarian war band of sorts. I will probably go the Red Sonia route and give her the red hair, silver scale armour...but we shall see, I need to get as far as undercoating first.

Thanks for reading,

DiStudios

The 14th legion

Get hold of the full Hasslefree Miniature range from: href="http://www.waylandgames.co.uk/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=139_0_3_1" target="_blank">Wayland Games - Discount Wargames