There are many tales of slaying dragons, but not many of bringing a slain dragon back to life, yet earlier this year I was asked to do just that. Someone had painted one of the enormous Reaper Dragons and done a nice job at it too. Unfortunately, it had not survived the dragonslayers employed by the Postal Service. It also hadn't been pinned. Which surprised me. This dragon, Guath, is at least a few pounds in weight, and some of the parts, such as the long neck and outstretched wings have very small stubby connectors. I hope the designers don't actually expect this miniature to be assembled by these and glue alone. But apparently some had thought that was reasonable, and gave it no more to reinforce it than glue. It arrived to the customer broken into many pieces, the paint job hopelessly ruined: large flakes of paint pealed away and most of the textured areas looking like road-rash. Such a shame.
I let it soak in Green Stuff for over a week, yet it wasn't enough to get all the paint off: the scales texture was a real pain, so I had to use pure Acetone, which worked great, but it sure isn't fun to work with. Next came cleaning and pinning. Hours of work to drill into the beast and line up the holes for pinning. But when it was all done, he was secure. Then it was just a matter of painting in the style to match the original Reaper paint job. It's a lot harder to paint when trying to mimic someone else's choice than just going with what you'd have in your own mind: no two people are going to do it the same way, even when trying to, and there are going to be some unavoidable differences, in exact color hue, slight style differences, etc, but as requested I tried to mimic the original artist's style and intent with as few differences as I could.
The dragon was a good deal of fun to paint, and I do like the mutli-tones of blue.
Blue is just such a refreshing and appealing color to paint.
So here is the dragon, risen from the dead to live again:
I let it soak in Green Stuff for over a week, yet it wasn't enough to get all the paint off: the scales texture was a real pain, so I had to use pure Acetone, which worked great, but it sure isn't fun to work with. Next came cleaning and pinning. Hours of work to drill into the beast and line up the holes for pinning. But when it was all done, he was secure. Then it was just a matter of painting in the style to match the original Reaper paint job. It's a lot harder to paint when trying to mimic someone else's choice than just going with what you'd have in your own mind: no two people are going to do it the same way, even when trying to, and there are going to be some unavoidable differences, in exact color hue, slight style differences, etc, but as requested I tried to mimic the original artist's style and intent with as few differences as I could.
The dragon was a good deal of fun to paint, and I do like the mutli-tones of blue.
Blue is just such a refreshing and appealing color to paint.
So here is the dragon, risen from the dead to live again:
Wow, nice save. Love the wings.
ReplyDeleteColors are superb.It's kind of lazy really that the person putting it together wouldn't pin it, shame indeed.
ReplyDeletebeautiful.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely fantastic! Love the colour too, really different vibrancy to what I'm used to painting with.
ReplyDeleteThanks all :) I enjoyed painting him- such a big mini, very different than what I normally do, made for a fun change.
ReplyDeleteWhat do the "before" pictures look like?
ReplyDeleteAmazing work, there, sir!
Unfortunately it seems I deleted the pictures I took of the damaged parts- but might still be on the emails- I'll have to see if they're something I did email or not, and add in a picture of it if so.
ReplyDelete