It's been a while since the last post and I was hoping to have a somewhat finished base board to show you... but I don't. However I do have pictures of the miniatures I will be mounting on it mostly painted.
Here's the trio of foolish knights fresh from their foray through the dungeon and looking to climax by slaying a dragon... a little one. The arrogant fop on the left is their leader, Sir Nilles Guel Fromage. A Bretonnian noble cast out from his country for being a prat and now associating with commoners from the Empire. His followers are suitably sunburnt Gammoners of the George Cross.
The two young dragons, a male with wings and a girl without. Between them the object of the hunting party, a waterleaper the juvenile male is learning to force from its lair by boiling the water around it. The female dragon is a rescue piece I was sent many years ago when the Oldhammer Forum was doing a round-robin "send a broken miniature to someone, they have to fix it and paint it" challenge. I finally fixed it and painted it in 2020 and now it needs a home. The male will have his nostrils drilled for flame once I start assembly.
Here's the bad boy himself, ol' spiny. I've tried to preserve the colour scheme he was painted in when I received him (he did get stripped and rebuilt from scratch) but to mute them a little. The joy of the sculpt is how natural it looks and I wanted to complement this with an earthy feel. His head has been repositioned a little so he is looking down at his offspring and the wings have been angled as to keep his balance on top of the skull. The weight of the bottom wing caused it to snap at the elbow joint so I drilled and inserted a long steel pin to fix it securely. The join was then masked with some putty and hopefully doesn't show too badly. It has held a month so far, fingers crossed it continues to!
The wings themselves are fine muslin scrim with layers of PVA glue applied, thinly at first until the wings could be dampened and shaped, then with much thicker layers to give a leathery texture. I mixed some paint into the glue layers and have painted further washes with inks over the top trying to preserve a translucency that looks like membrane.
The Aedwyrm has been painted for the longest amount of time so the plan was to try and match the colouring in with the others but to give each a different kind of accent colour. This was originally determined by the four elements, so the Aedwyrm is earthy hues, the Spined Dragon has an airy blue and the young winged dragon has a fiery red as he spouts flame at his prey. When I decided to add the fourth dragon I wanted it to be closer to the Aedwyrm in colouration as in form so I gave her an orange accent rather than going along with the theme and doing something watery.
All looking good. I've had some fun putting my Aedwyrm together.. with the wings (At first, I wondered if i could try to make them removeable for the choice but that completely failed for reasons which should have been clear to me, so i decided i might get a second one later if I wanted to go a wingless one).. for some reason, had a bit of a pain getting the feet all level but decided, since i ended up with one arm slightly raised, to stick someone underneather that but I don't really feel like Human or Fae so.. it's a pain to find a nice body laying down.. did wonder about a slightly comical goblin.. not dead just kinda flatten with a tongue sticking out (very 80s citedel style) but.. all I can find as a model is some new plastic kit for a giant with a goblin which is so-so and looks far the wrong scale anyway.. and sculpting one from scratch is .. MAYBE an option but.. I'm very much not skilled in the field ^_^; Colour scheme is another problem.. trying to think of something interesting.. kinda narrowed down to a few ideas but still...
ReplyDeleteYou seam to have gotten the colour schemes looking very good.. each different but don't look like they aren't the same family. too easy to do colours which you are then stuck thinking 'How do a black dragon and a white dragon have a green baby?' but while different, I think they all seam to complement each other. Also making me wanna really try to get my first attempt at a diorama done.. even though one figure is gonna need to be completely built from scratch and I have no clue how to do a spiders-web (some say using an airgun but 1) I don't have one and 2) I don't have hand control to really use one well.
Have a play with UHU glue for spider webs. Really stringy, transparent glue you can coax with a cocktail stick and surprisingly strong when set.
DeleteAh, the standard yellow tube stuff? might be an idea.. it's a pain this thing.. a chasm with a large spidersweb over it, with a dragon trapped in it, and the spider moving towards it.. the dragon needs to be pretty much scrap made, I got a Spider that should do from Heresy (the character, Y'gramul the Many is techinally thousands and thousands of tiny steel-blue insects which make up one single being which can take on different forms, but the main one seams to be the spider, so for a model, a spider seamed the best choice).. Might be soo much easier NOT to base it on something from a book where you are given alot of range but limited by what is stated and just do something completely original first but oh well..
DeleteYeah the regular stuff, though HART I think dries faster. Maybe get some really fine nylon thread to make the big strands and coat them with a thin layer of UHU to unify everything? Not sure how UHU would stand up over long distances.
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