I painted this miniature for the first time in July of last year so I was hoping to see some obvious improvements in this one. I'm definitely happy with how it turned out, I liked the colour scheme of the first but it wasn't really striking enough and looked a little flat. The darker blue I used this time helped with that and the contrasting gold helped to define all of the plates.

I haven't been all that happy with my NMM for a while now (I think it has been a little simplistic) so I tried for something a little different on the sword this time. I think the result is a shinier, more realistic look but I'll keep working on it...

The thing I'm happiest with though is the base . Up until now my bases have been a little crappy for the most part, with this one I wanted a more realistic look. A lot of painters (myself included) are desperate to finish the miniature by the time they get to the base and it suffers because of it but a little extra time spent makes the world of difference. It's probably the first base I've been really happy with and on top of that it was fun to make and paint so I'll try to concentrate more on them in the future.

In conclusion I think this bard is a pretty big improvement over the previous one which was certainly very gratifying.