Garden Ninja Studios ← Professional painting of wargaming minis + geek cake toppers

Dragon Cake Toppers

Jan

18

2022

Over the years I’ve created a few wedding cake toppers that included dragons.A few were for couples that had a dragon incorporated into the cake itself, but sometimes I get to paint up a dragon figure to go on the topper with them. For the most part, I use existing dragon miniatures rather than sculpt ...

Doctor Strange Chibi

Jan

14

2022

This chibi miniature comes from CMON’s Marvel United game.He’s a massive game changing character (which seems appropriate). For his paintjob, I really wanted to combine the comic book style I’ve been using on my Marvel United miniatures with some object source lighting for all of his magic swirly things.

Be’lakor

Jan

12

2022

A little while ago I got a chance to paint Be’lakor.It is little wonder that this guy was the fan favorite from GW. He’s really well done and he is just so METAL.This was a relatively simple paintjob to go with an existing army. I feel like the mini really lends itself well to this.

Happy Holidays!

Dec

23

2021

This is a little nativity diorama I made a few years ago. The character sculpts are by Tom Meier of Thunderbolt Mountain, which means that even at a larger scale those details were tiny.This piece does not reside in my own home. If it were here, the nativity would inescapably be attacked by eldritch monsters ...

Comic Style Wolverine and Beast

Dec

14

2021

I’ve continued painting Marvel United X-Men characters using comic lines as reference, and here are Beast and Wolverine.The bright colors that would probably never work in a film adaptation are really working to make the comic book lines show up.Also, it seems totally bonkers to put together any Marvel team without Wolverine. I mean, that ...

Why choose black or white for Storm?

Dec

6

2021

The Marvel United Storm mini uses the 1992 outfit she used that Jim Lee designed. One of the strangest things about this outfit is the way it was colored. Some readers thought it was black, others thought it was white- while a third group decided on a middle ground by saying the fabric was metallic ...

Master of Magnetism

Dec

3

2021

The X-Men entering Marvel United has been pretty terrific. While the Avengers sculpts were mostly based on recent comics that closely matched the film versions of the characters, the X-Men miniatures were mostly based on their 1990s incarnations.As such, the comic style painting comes very naturally to the miniatures, so I’ve really leaned into it.So ...

Wedding Cake Toppers with Swords!

Nov

12

2021

A lot of the wedding cake toppers that I make represent something the couple loves to do together, a hobby, gaming, fandoms and things like that.I am always quite happy to work with fencers of any kind because they have me make a couple with swords. And these two couples had me use stances that ...

Kingdom Death Phoenixes

Nov

4

2021

I sometimes wonder if there is only one phoenix that is constantly being reborn as it dies, or if there are several members of this elusive species.At any rate, I’ve had the opportunity to paint the Phoenix three times in three different color schemes. Here they are: For this phoenix, I based the color scheme ...

Mumlak the Barbarian Wooly Mammoth

Oct

22

2021

I picked up this mini at Reapercon 2019 intending to paint it up for the next year. As it turned out, I hadn’t started painting it yet when I started packing for Reapercon 2020.So I got to working on it and surprisingly got it finished in time to enter it into the competition (even though ...