PETER PAINTS: THE RED DRAGON, PART 4

Hello! I’m Peter Lee, a member of D&D R&D here at Wizards of the Coast. Another week goes by quickly! Now that I’m done airbrushing the dragon,  I want to glue the dragon to the base that I finished two weeks ago . Before I do that, I want to paint much of the underside of the dragon. Here’s where I stand after last week:

Here’s the underside of the dragon.

This week, I’ll be doing a lot of wet blending. Wet blending is a technique that allows you to paint smooth gradients of color by mixing paint on the miniature itself. I mix up a couple of shades of red and black.

Here’s an example of wet blending in action:

In the upper right corner (Picture 1), I paint a line of dark red along the dragon’s leg. In the upper left corner (Picture 2), I take the medium-dark red and paint above and below the dark line, but I blend the paint to hide the brush stroke. In the lower right (picture 3), I do the same with a medium-light red. Finally, the transition is complete when I blend in the brightest red color.

Here’s the lower left leg after painting the shadows and how it blends in with what I already did on the base. It’s not perfect, but I need to wait to do that after I glue the dragon to the base.

Painting the shadows basically involve doing that over and over again. The next picture shows before and after I painted the outer edge of the right forearm.

Here’s a similar process on the inside edge of the right forearm.

Here’s the process on the left forearm, including bonus claws!

I finish by painting various claws black, such as the claws at the elbow. I’m now ready to glue the miniature to the base. Since I already prepared the miniature for this from the start, all I need to do is superglue!

Here’s the dragon finally glued to the base. You’ll notice the seams where the miniature was two pieces. That’s why I didn’t worry too much about matching the colors there: I need to fill those gaps with putty.

I take my handy sculpting tool, mix up some putty, and roll out thin snakes of green stuff to stick in the holes.

Here’s a final shot after filling the gap.

I need to let the putty cure overnight, so that’s a good time to stop for this week. See you next week! You can follow along with my work on twitter; just follow @minipete. Thanks!