Buglips and Guindyloo paint DHL 02017: Scorpius Rex Dracus

[Guindyloo]

Hi friends! We have another project to share with you in our continuing series where Buglips and I paint the same figure using our own very different from each other approaches to miniature painting. If you're not familiar with this series, you can check out our previous topics:

03100: Thanis the Bonecaller

01614: Con Crud 2017 Convention Zombie

02818: Bugbear Warrior

 

For this project, we decided to paint Scorpius Rex Dracus, which is an older figure in the back catalog of Reaper - just look at the number! 02017! He's one of the OG's of the Reaper catalog! Our usual method for picking a figure is generally that one of us already owns it and suggests it and then the other of us goes and orders it. However, for Scorpius Rex Dracus, we actually both already owned him because he's a really neat figure with a lot of personality.

 

I know a lot of people are a bit intimidated by the thought of painting dragons, but I promise they're a lot of fun and this guy would actually be a great starter dragon, as he's on the smaller side. I didn't have a Sir Forscale, but here he is next to Queen Illeosa of Korvosa to give you an idea of his size.

So you can see, he's a far less intimidating size than the dragons you see in Bones. (Spoiler alert, I'm going to assemble him a little later. )

 

But for now, here he is straight out of the blister:

 

As we've done with our previous WIP posts, I will be tackling this guy with my method of painting for display and I'll do my best to take y'all through all of the steps that I go through from start to finish and share my thoughts with you as I go along.

 

As always, please feel free to comment or ask questions - I'm always glad to help out in whatever way I can along the way. I'll try not to take too many blurry pictures....but no promises. 

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

And here is mine, not quite so fresh from the blister since he last saw it ten years ago and has lived in a baggie ever since:

 

 

This one will not just be different colours, but it turns out our respective plans regarding painting and assembly steps are opposite from one another - so you'll get to see two different approaches for these fiddly-to-assemble beastly types.  Scorpius Rex Dracus assembles like most dragons, so what we cover here should apply to most dragon or dragon-like (wyvern) type models.  The scale might be a bit different, though!

 

 

[Guindyloo]

Alright, so when you have a figure like this that comes in multiple parts, the very first thing that you want to do is make sure that you have all of the pieces. Reaper is really great, but there can be occasions where something went awry. Fortunately, when that does happen, Reaper has great costumer service and will send you a replacement piece very quickly. I had one occasion where I had two of the same arm for a troll and they sent me both arms right away to make sure that I had everything I needed. So make sure you check before you start just to be certain. It's a much easier thing to get taken care of before you've started painting.

So the best way to verify that you have everything is to do what we refer to as "dry-fitting" which is just fitting the character together without using any glue. That way you know everything's there and how it's going to fit together, so you know if you have any issues to contend with - things like whether you need to shave any of the metal off to make a fit more snug or where the gaps are that might need filling. You can also see ahead of time areas where you might have issues painting - tricky areas to get into and whatnot.  

 

That is what led me to discover that I had a bit of an issue going on.

His legs did not line up to sit properly in the holes for his feet. Now, it's not uncommon for parts to come bent and usually it's an easy fix to just gently, but firmly bend the part back into place - things like arms or weapons. But this guy's legs are SOLID. I could not make them budge for the life of me. I had no idea what to do. Fortunately, I was talking to Buglips at the time and he had an idea.

 

So I took a screwdriver and slid it between the two legs, like so:

Then I used gentle pressure to leverage the legs further apart. I did this very gradually because I didn't want to move the leg too far and then not be able to bend it back.

 

Much better.

 

So with that problem solved, I went on to mold line removal. Now my cast has some issues that are not common. Rather than a traditional mold line, I've got some big ridges to contend with. This is referred to as mold slippage, where the two halves of the mold did not completely line up when the figure was cast. It's different from a mold line - a mold line is that little bit of extra metal at the seams. With mold slippage, there's a big ridge where the two halves didn't align properly. Like I said, this is not common and is the first time I've had it happen with a metal Reaper figure. I suspect that had I written to Reaper and explained the problem, they would have replaced the figure. Reaper stands by the quality of their figures and are really good about making things right. However, since I was already working on the figure, I decided to just forge ahead with it. You'll see that Buglips' copy of the same figure did not have these same issues, so it's not a common problem with this particular figure, nor is it, as I said, common at all.

I'm not sure how clearly you can see it, (although if you go back and look at my fresh out of the blister picture, I think it's pretty obvious - you can also compare my picture to Buglips' picture and see the difference between a mold slippage ridge like this and normal mold lines) but it runs the entire length of the figure and took quite a bit of work to clean up. I used my exacto blade to cut away the ridge and spent a couple of hours very carefully doing so, as I didn't want to gouge the figure nor myself.

The biggest problem that an issue like this will cause is loss of detail from the areas that you have to carve away and I think it would be a bigger problem on a smaller figure, especially if it happens to fall into areas that have lots of detail sculpted into them. With this figure, I treated the ridge just like a really big mold line. You'll see in subsequent pictures that I missed some spots and still need to do a bit more work.

 

So once I decided to move on, I went ahead and clipped the arms apart. Your natural inclination may be to cut the arms away from the sprue as close to the arm as possible and that may be the proper way to do it in some cases. You always want to check ahead of time how pieces that come on a sprue actually attach to the figure though and in this case, you want to cut the arms away as close to the sprue as you can so that you're leaving the tabs on the ends of the arms. They're meant to be there, as they're what help the arms to fit into the figure.

Leaving the tabs on, the arms fit very neatly into the arm holes and it was such a nice fit that on one of them, the arm actually stayed in place without any glue....but obviously you want to use glue to make it permanently stay...unless you're into removable arms on your figures.

 

Now something to note here is that you want to make good decisions on how much you're going to assemble a figure before you do so. Fully assembling a multi-part figure can cause you access issues with your paint brush down the road. However, you also have to weigh how important that access is to you against the complication of greenstuffing the figure. Some multi-part figures don't need any greenstuffing to fill in gaps and some do. Some require less greenstuff to fill the gaps than others. You absolutely want to think about those things before you forge ahead with assembly. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to partially assemble the model, sometimes it's easiest to fully assemble and sometimes it's easiest to paint each piece separately and assemble later. There's no right answer. I weighed the pros and cons and decided that I wanted to have an easier time with the greenstuff and not have to patch up my paint job down the road and went ahead with fully assembling the model with super glue.

 

 

Now for the most part, he fits together really well (my issues with the bent legs aside) and one could reasonably decide not to do any gap filling at all and it would be fine, especially if you're just painting the figure for tabletop use. I wanted to go ahead and fill the gaps though.

 

So I've mentioned before that there's kind of this rule with greenstuff where you will always mix up at least twice as much as you actually need, so take half as much as you think you need and then cut that in half again and you'll probably still end up with twice as much as you needed. Well, I was talking while I was mixing up my greenstuff and not thinking and ended up with this much mixed...

 

 Someone with sculpting talent could probably sculpt an entire human sized figure with that amount. Good job, Guindy. Fortunately, I had another project that I could use it for, so it didn't go to waste. I would suggest, if you're going to work with greenstuff, to always have something that we refer to as a "putty catcher." This is something that you have on hand that you can use any extra greenstuff you might have on. I have a couple of such projects, so it wasn't a bother at all.

 

So when you work with greenstuff, you want to remember that any surface that you do not want the greenstuff to stick to should be wet. So your fingers, your tools and the surface that you leave the putty on. I recommend putting your mixed greenstuff on the plastic from a blister. I just leave mine sitting in a puddle of water on my desk because I'm a savage. 

 

So to fill gaps, what I do is roll a little snake of greenstuff and place it in the gap that I want to fill.

 

Then I cut away the excess.

 

Then using a sculpting tool that I have with a pointy end (a toothpick will work just as well) I poke the greenstuff into the gap and then flatten and drag out the excess.

 

If there's texture in the spot where it is, I'll try to mimic that texture with little pokes and dragging my tool through it.

For areas that I want to be flatter, like the arms, I wet my finger and then press and drag to smooth it out.

 

 

I'm honestly not particularly skilled with greenstuff, but I thought he looked pretty good. Now, normally I would tell you that you can go ahead and prime over top of the greenstuff before it's cured. However, Buglips made me realize that I actually forgot to wash him with dish soap and water, which I normally would have done before assembly. I was so distracted by cleaning up the ridge that I totally forgot. SO don't forget that! There is often mold release agent on figures that you want to clean off because it will not play nice with your primer or paint. So I left the greenstuff to cure over night because otherwise, I would've ruined the work I'd done with the old toothbrush that I use for scrubbing. It'll be fine to use over cured greenstuff though.

[buglips*the*goblin]

So, as Guindy noted, my Scorpius Rex did not have much in the way of troublesome mold lines.  Also, as shown in her above post, she assembled hers all the way before painting - but I will be painting mine and then assembling.  Either method is fine, it depends on what you're comfortable doing - and of course you can do it in partial assemblies too.  I chose to assemble last so I could be sure of getting to all the spots I need to paint, but I will have to go in and touch up around my greenstuff work when I do.  This was also how I (finally) finished Takhisis, so I already know it should work out okay.

 

The only part of my filing I thought worth noting is that if you have a triangular file as seen in my pic below, when you file along seams if you don't want to just obliterate all the detail to a smooth surface you can use the edge of the file to rough up around the line instead.  This will keep a bit of texture if you do it in a crosshatch style so that you have something to work with.  The body of the dragon is rather pebbly, so I thought being too smooth along the top seam would look weird.

 

 

Having filed and trimmed everything, I had to get inventive to find ways to mount the parts for painting.  So for the main body I decided I wanted it belly side up, and I figured if I could mount it on a small area I can get to later (maybe even post-assembly) then I could do most of my work without rubbing any of it off.  So I (gently) clamped the stinger tail into a C-clamp:

 

 

For the head, I chose to use a smaller clamp and clamp one horn.  The horns are prominent, so again I shoul be able to get to it easily for painting later.  This smaller clamp has movable end pieces, so to prevent the horn working loose and the head flying away I jammed some yellow poster tack on the ends for a more sure grip:

 

 

For the wings, I'll be doing the bottom membranes in a different colour than the top, so I decided to tack one side down onto some paint pots I scavenged from an old paint-by-number set.  I used blue poster tack for this, it's not quite as sticky as the yellow.  This may allow me to simply flip the wings over so I can then paint the unfinished side, without pulling off my previous work. 

 

 

The arms gave me a bit of thinking to do because the center joiner was too small to clamp.  I realized then I already had a tool for the job, so I drilled a hole in the center joiner and mounted it to this jig in the pic below.  I rigged this up as a holder for Vanessa Redstorm's mounted figure and it does the job admirably.  MacGyver would be proud.

 

 

 

Edited February 11, 2018 by buglips*the*goblin

[Glitterwolf]

Thx for putting another WIP up, I love your joint WIPS/Tutorials.

 

They are very helpful!

[Guindyloo]

6 hours ago, Glitterwolf said:

Thx for putting another WIP up, I love your joint WIPS/Tutorials.

 

They are very helpful!

Thanks for following along with us!

We really enjoy doing them, so it’s always good to hear that people like them and find them helpful!

[Crowley]

Yay! Another thread!!

 

Also, I really should dig around Reaper's back catalog... 

[Gargs]

Excellent stuff! This thread may just be the inspiration I need to finally start digging into my dragon and dragon-like minis!

[Flit]

Guindy, I have a question about how you handled the mold slippage. The pic looks to me like it wasn't too bad. My question is if you considered using green stuff to fill the ridge from the high side to the low side. I do this sometimes with slippage because for me it can be easier or less time intensive to copy the texture with green stuff than filing down the high side of the slippage. It's sort of like gap filling. The slippage on this mini may not have been extensive enough for that approach to be practical though. Just curious about your approach.

[Chaoswolf]

Doing these joint WIP threads is a genius idea; congrats and thanks to both of you for doing this!

 

@Guindyloo--special thanks for going into detail with the assembly of this particular model. You didn't cover anything I didn't know, but a lot of it I had to learn the hard way. If you doing this saves even one person from those painful lessons, then you have accomplished an awesome thing. 

[Glitterwolf]

Are you going to do this only for Reaper minis?

I mean, there are some great Ral Parthas out there too, and I have found a lot of them needing extensive gapfilling if not resculpting parts.

 

With my Chess Playing Dragon I had to sculpt a reasonable chunk of the midtail..

[buglips*the*goblin]

17 minutes ago, Glitterwolf said:

Are you going to do this only for Reaper minis?

 

Yes, only Reaper miniatures.  This is for a couple of reasons.

 

First, expanding beyond Reaper creates logistical issues because Reaper is one of the few companies we have in common.  I collect RAFM and Partha (with a smattering of Darksword), Guindy likes Kingdom Death and others, and while there are lots of good figures out there from other companies not all of them are easily gotten if one of us has it and the other doesn't.  We tend to buy Reaper regularly, so any figure we don't already have is simple to add to the cart.

 

Second, if we were going to do this as a regular thing we thought we should use the opportunity to promote some Reaper stuff, especially interesting stuff that might get lost in the vastness of the back catalog.  It's Reaper's site, after all, and if we find something cool that people want then why not send the business to our hosts?  Reaper is good about people posting figures from other companies, so by way of thanks we're going to make these exclusively Reaper products.

 

With few exceptions, we try to keep it mostly to figures that are still in production.  This is so people can get them if they like 'em.  Con Crud was an exception because he was too much fun to pass up, and when we switch roles and I have to paint fancy then we'll be using 25th Anniversary figures.  This will be maybe 10% of what we do.

 

The only other rule is no nudity, mostly because third-party linking is a pain in the butt. 

 

 

[Guindyloo]

2 hours ago, Flit said:

Guindy, I have a question about how you handled the mold slippage. The pic looks to me like it wasn't too bad. My question is if you considered using green stuff to fill the ridge from the high side to the low side. I do this sometimes with slippage because for me it can be easier or less time intensive to copy the texture with green stuff than filing down the high side of the slippage. It's sort of like gap filling. The slippage on this mini may not have been extensive enough for that approach to be practical though. Just curious about your approach.

So, unfortunately I didn't properly document the issue. In the picture where I start talking about the mold slippage, I had already been carving away at the ridge for some time when I thought "ah, crap, I should've taken more pictures of this." So it was worse than it looked there and to answer your question, yes, I did consider using greenstuff for it once I realized how extensive the issue was. The reason I didn't go that direction is because, honestly, I'm not terribly comfortable with using greenstuff. I'm trying to get myself more familiar with it, but right now my skill level with it is only at a level for adequate-ish gap filling. To use it on the entire length of the figure in a way that would actually look good would take some minor and pretty rudimentary sculpting skill, but minor as it may be, it wasn't something that I felt comfortable doing. I felt far more comfortable with carving it down even though it was quite a bit more time consuming and perhaps more risky in a physical sense, but I felt that aesthetically speaking, I would have a better result with treating it like a particularly gnarly mold line.

 

Thank you for bringing that up, as certainly greenstuff would be a very good solution to the issue for people who are more comfortable or at least more adventurous with their greenstuffing.

[Cyradis]

I am pretty sure have an older painted figure with some mold slippage that I failed to remove, if you want me to get a photo to demonstrate that issue. I think it happened a lot more on older models than new ones. 

[pcktlnt]

Out of curiosity, do you two take suggestions for future paints?