Peter Paints: The Red Dragon

Welcome to our new series, Peter Paints! Peter Lee is a game designer here at Wizards as well as a super talented painter of miniatures. To prove it, we asked him to chronicle the painting of a miniature from Gale Force Nine. You can follow Peter on Twitter for more updates. 

Without further ado, here’s Peter!

Hi! My name is Peter Lee, and I am a game designer working for Wizards of the Coast in R&D. I’ve been an avid miniature painter for over 20 years, and my mostrecent project is the upcoming Red Dragon miniature from Gale Force Nine. 

As with most miniatures, the dragon is unpainted and unassembled. There are 19 pieces in all, but you either use the six inch diameter base or the three claws in the upper right. The first step is to clean up the mold lines and cut off he sprue. (You can see the sprue connected to a few pieces in the bottom center of this picture.)

Here is a list of the tools that I will use:

·      Hobby knife

·      Metal wire for pins

·      Pin vise (a tool for holding drill bits)

·      Sculpting tools

·      Toothpicks

·      5-minute epoxy glue

·      Superglue

·      Cutting surface (I use an piece of cork flooring)

·      Green stuff (epoxy putty)

·      Glass of water

Here’s a better picture of a piece of sprue, and it also shows a neat trick - you can reshape resin under hot tap water. I bent this piece of resin after running warm tap water over it. (A hot hair dryer also works.) Being able to reshape the plastic makes it easier to fit the pieces together.

After cleaning up the mold lines, the next step is to insert metal pins to help support the figure. Since I expect people to pick up the miniature on the gaming table, I want to be sure that it holds together. In this picture I am drilling holes in the wing. It’s a bit excessive, but I like my work to last.

I drill three holes total for each wing. It’s difficult to drill the hole without punching through the side of the wing.

The ultimate goal is that the wing holds together with no glue. This makes it easier when I finally glue the parts together.

That’s a big wingspan. Only glue used so far are the two halves of the body.

The base is so detailed that I will need to paint it separately. Therefore, I want it easy to remove the dragon as it won’t be glued to the base until after I paint quite a bit of the figure. I drill holes for three vertical pins in the feet.

Now that I’m done drilling, it’s time to fill the seams with green stuff. Green stuff is an epoxy putty. You mix the blue and green parts together, and it slowly hardens over a few hours.  Note that you want to remove the section where the yellow and blue putty touch, as it has already cured and will make the putty lumpy and hard to work with.

For most seams, it’s as easy as rolling a small snake and sculpting it with a wet toothpick.

Now I need to glue the wings together. After using warm water to help finesse the wings, I glue the left wing together with epoxy.

I use tape to hold the right wing together while the epoxy hardens.

Because the wings are so smooth, I use a metal tool for filling the gap in the wing. Since green stuff is pretty sticky, you need a glass of water nearby to wet your tool. The putty doesn’t stick to the tool when the tool is wet.

One wing done.

Other wing done. I didn’t use all the putty, so I stick it into the freezer to slow the reaction while I glue other parts together.

The red dragon has two belly scale pieces that cover the body seam.

Here’s a picture with the belly scales attached. The belly scales were curling up a little, but a blast from a hot hair dryer softened the plastic and stopped the bend.

Here’s a shot with the chest piece attached.

Here are the two halves of the dragon head. Note the tongue in the lower jaw; that was a separate piece.

Here’s the complete dragon head.

I’ve glued the neck to the body.

It’s starting to look like a dragon after attaching the head and tail.

Here is the dragon with the left wing attached.

Here’s a top view after attaching the second wing. All that remains is some minor gap filling around the wings and she’s ready to paint!

One of my favorite tools is a wet toothpick with the tip broken off. It provides some texture to the green stuff. 

To fill these seams, I roll out a thin snake of green stuff and push it into the crack.

I repeatedly push with a frayed wet toothpick to give a slight texture to the green stuff. You can see the wood fibers at the end of the toothpick.

Finished filling the seams!

Here’s the final assembled sculpt of the red dragon from Gale Force Nine. I took the picture next to a (not so) huge red dragon from the Dungeons & Dragons Minis set Giants of Legend to give an idea of scale. This dragon is big! The figure is now ready to be primed and painted.

Thanks, Pete! We’re looking forward to the next installment of Peter Paints to see how this progresses!