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.
