Thursday, May 14, 2020

From StuartL - Here Be Dragon (singular).

As penance for failing to post anything last week, I have managed to get a second submission ready for this week. As the title of the post implies, I have painted a dragon. I prepped the model for the winter challenge, but couldn't find time to work it in to my plan for Challenge Island, so it has been sat in my to do pile demanding some attention for nearly 6 months now.


As any fan of Dungeons and Dragons well knows, evil dragons come in various colours (red, green, black etc.) while good dragons are a variety of different hues of metal. A while ago I painted a red dragon, so this time I figured I would do one of the good guys and eventually settled on a Brass dragon. (The fur on the spine is bronze and the thick line of scales running down the flanks is gold).


The model was initially painted in an orange-ish brown colour. The wings were quickly drybrushed and the teeth and claws painted, then everything got a wash of brown. After that, all of the scales were painted, one by one. It took a while, but I feel the overall effect was pretty good.


And just to provide a sense of scale, here is a 28mm mini alongside. The dragon measures 10" long from nose to tail and the raised wings reach over 6" off the ground. I have heavily backed all of the Reaper Bones kickstarters, simply because there are so many cool minis like this one and they are incredibly cheap. I believe that this dragon was priced at US$15 during a previous kickstarter. While some of the mold lines are a bit difficult to remove and the material is a bit bendy at times, the big pieces like dragons, demons and giants are fantastic value for money.

For unofficial scoring, I'm going to add 20 points for this fine specimen. Even though it's a huge mini, there weren't that many technical bits, just a lot of simple brushwork. This puts my tally up to 779.5 points.