September 10, 2007
Painting the Dragon
I've finally started painting Marthrangul. I'll try to post an in-progress shot tonight.
I'm painting him as a red dragon. Because, duh. Colossal dragon near the end of the campaign? He's a red.
I'm planning on keeping the green spine-mane and side-plates; green makes a good contrast with red, I'm led to believe. But probably not on the wings; there, I'll try to go with ashy black on the trailing edges, as the Draconomicon says. It also says blue-black, and we'll see when we get there what I think or can do with blue-black.
You'll notice the line of small spine-plates flanking the mane (on both sides, though you can't tell from the photo). Reaper's painter, Anne Foerster, painted them just like the rest of the hide plates. My first instinct was to paint them as bony or horny extrusions. There are a lot of them, of course, and painting them like hide plates is certainly simpler and probably faster, but it make the critter more monochromatic. OTOH, painting the tail spike like hide plates solves the problem of the tail spike very effectively, and the same effect may be in play with the spine plates.
What do you think?
Update with pic below.
I have left off the face because the horns block access to the neck, and one of the wings to ease access to the spine.
And looking at the pic, I can see where I missed a mold line on one of the horns.
At this stage, I've just started painting the spine mane (medium green; to come, forest green shade and light green highlight) and the mouth (burgundy; to come, I'm going to freestyle a tongue.).
Posted by Greg at September 10, 2007 12:55 PM
An ambitious project; I've never painted anything so large. It's a pretty cool looking dragon fig, and not in one of those bizarre positions that kinda look cool but is impossible to balance with a figure so large.
How are you going to paint the scales? I find it interesting how different people approaching painting a figure in such different ways, and I am curious what you are envisioning there.
Well, I'm basically just going to imitate Reaper's painter's work, I think. And after studying it some last night, I think I'm also going to imitate her with regards to the spine plates and other extrusions, and only paint as horns the things that are unambiguously horns.
For the scales and hide, I'm just going to base the whole thing in a medium or medium-to-dark red, then do a moderately thick wash in dark red to get all the hide, then highlight each individual scale in medium-to-light red, which will be tedious but rewarding. The scale of the figure will help that a lot, since each scale is large enough to not need the highest precision work. I'll probably wear out a lot of brushes, though!
I'll have to do some experimenting to see if the red is too overwhelming. Also, there's not going to be any possibility of doing mixes, since the fig is large enough that it's going to need multiple sittings at each step, so I need to be able to reliably reproduce a color from sitting to sitting.
For the side plates, same as the spine mane, with medium green base, dark green shade, light green (to yellow) highlight.
For the bottom plates, same, but in red, and one full step lighter than the scales/hide.
The wings are going to suck the most. Big flat planes means the usual 3-step approach is of marginal utility. Reaper's painter freestyled a bunch of decoration, and I'm going to try at least a bit, like a said, going for an ashy look.