Pingo hopes to do justice to 77108: Shadow Dragon

[Pingo]

So.

I tried painting some minis without WIPs and found myself having a hard time keeping track of what and how much I had done. So I'm back, although these may be sporadic and really slow to update. We'll see.

Anyhow, after painting a lot of tiny figures for the January Bones Beauty Pageant, I decided to move in the opposite direction and tackle some of the big figures from Bones I to clear out room for Bones II.

So I am painting dragons. Five of them, if you count the Frost Wyrm. Each one gets its own thread, though, since I don't know how I'm going to progress through them.

 

I'm painting each dragon up as inspiration takes me.  I thought this one, 77108, the Shadow Dragon, looked slightly aquatic, like a river deity.  So I decided to paint it up in cool, watery shades.  Maybe like some kind of frog or sea creature.  I don't know yet.

 

Anyhow, first I put on a base coat of Reaper's Brown Liner, the paint which sticks to Bones like gangbusters, thanks to Buglips for the discovery, and then a wash of medium blue mixed from Phthalocyanine Blue and a little Titanium White.

 

I don't expect the final dragon to be straight blue like this, but I needed to give all the dragons a distinct color scheme at the start since none of their wings are glued on yet and I need to keep them straight.

 

The other dragons I'm painting concurrently are Deathsleet, Ebonwrath, the Fire Dragon, and the Frost Wyrm.

Edited February 28, 2015 by Pingo

[ShadowRaven]

One of my favourite dragons. I look forward to seeing what magic you work on it

[Marineal]

haha. I love these titles. :)

[Pingo]

The first layer on this dragon was Phthalo Blue, a sort of electric turquoise.

 

For a completely different effect, I used Ultramarine Blue, which is much warmer and gentler (although near-fluorescent under UV light) to mix a cool grey with Burnt Sienna.  I washed the color straight over the rocks on the dragon's base, then lightened it with a little Titanium White and brushed it over the rocks and the dragon's underbelly.

 

[Pingo]

While I was working on something else I washed some transparent green over a few areas of the dragon and its wings. 

 

I do things like this a lot.  I'll be working on multiple projects and I'll have some extra of a color.  I find single hues sometimes flat and a little monotonous, so I'll add some color, sometimes to the shadows or highlights, sometimes just where inspiration takes me.

[Pingo]

I glued the wings on.  They fit very well, but there is a little gapping.

 

I took my handy tub of Golden Molding Paste, a mix of acrylic medium and marble dust with the consistency of toothpaste which is excellent for filling small gaps and marginally sculptable in a minor way (I'm pretty sure it's what GW sells at a serious markup as "liquid green stuff"), and applied some to the gaps with a palette knife.

 

I then smoothed the paste down with a combination of dry Q-tips, damp Q-tips, and a bamboo kitchen skewer.

 

The molding paste (Liquitex and other brands sell similar called "modelling paste.") dries to a non-intense white and can be painted over like any acrylic.  This dragon is in early enough stages that retouching the white areas is not going to be a pain.

[Pingo]

Retouching and proceeding.

 

After the molding paste dried, I brushed over the white with a medium blue mixed from Ultramarine Blue, Titanium White, and possibly a tiny amount of Phthalocyanine Green (it was a rather chaotic palette).

 

Once that was dry I washed over it with a transparent green mixed from Phthalocyanine Blue and Burnt Umber (paint still wet and shiny in this picture).

 

Then I set it aside for a bit while I worked on some other things.  Eventually I had a nice deep violet-black mixed (I think it was Phthalo Blue, a little Iron Oxide Red, Quinacridone Magenta, and Ultramarine Blue). 

 

I knew I wanted to make this dragon striped.  So I started a pattern.

 

 

Right now it's a little dark and obscure.  I'm definitely going in to highlight the paler stripes between the dark stripes, and I may put lighter stripes within the dark ones the way one sees on some fish.

[Humansquish]

The stripes look really good on it.

[Pingo]

I mixed a medium blue with Ultramarine Blue and Phthalo Green and Titanium White and painted in lighter areas between the dark stripes (or maybe the base color is dark and the stripes are white, like zebras).

 

[Corporea]

oooh!  It reminds me of all those fun dinosaur patterns! I love it!!

[Glitterwolf]

Tigershark Dragon.  Great colourscheme.

[Dr.Bedlam]

Lovely work.

You are braver than I. I'd never dare paint that many dragons concurrently...

[ShadowRaven]

Love it.

[Pingo]

I had a mixed near-black for another project (Is anyone noticing a pattern here?), so I added some deeper shadows to the wings and body.  The undersides of the wings hardly show at all in the photographs they're so dark, but here are the upper surfaces.

 

I'm painting the wings a little illusionistically to exaggerate their shape.

 

 

Oh wait, here's a side picture anyway.  The light is a bright flash from directly in front;  all of the visible shading (apart from a bit of line of shine) is paint.

[Pingo]

Glazed some violet shadows on.