PETER PAINTS: THE RED DRAGON, PART 5

Hello! I’m Peter Lee, a member of D&D R&D here at Wizards of the Coast. For the last month or so, I’ve been painting a little bit of Gale Force Nine’s upcoming red dragon miniature. Last week, I painted enough of the underside of the dragon that I could finally glue it to the base. This week, I start painting the dragon’s head.

I find the face of any miniature to be one of the most important parts, so I try to do it as early as possible. Since this miniature required a lot of airbrushing and detail work on the underside of the base, I haven’t been able to do it until now. I start by painting the mouth. I begin with the mouth because it is the hardest section to physically access with the paint brush. It is best to start with the hardest section first as you are most likely to make mistakes or overpaint. You don’t want a stray brush stroke to ruin all your hard work!

For the gums, I like mixing skin tones with color. Almost all my paints are held in dropper bottles, so I can easily control mix portions by counting drops of paint. I mix together three colors. Each color has a drop of red and purple, and I only alter the shade of brown by adding two drops of mahogany brown, beige red, and a light skin tone in each palette reservoir.

I start by painting the gums and tongue. The first shade is very close to the dragon’s skin color, so I admit it’s difficult in the next photo to see the difference.

To make this difference more obvious, I paint a dark red line around the gums to make them stand out. I’ll paint over some of the line in a little while to make it stand out less.

I continue to highlight the gums and tongue with the three shades that I mixed up.

After painting the gums, I paint a mixture of mahogany brown and cork brown on the teeth.

I add some pale sand into the mixture and paint another layer on the higher parts of the teeth.

I finish highlighting the teeth, and I add a thin wash of brown to darken the recesses of the teeth. I also paint some lighter shades of red to cover some of the dark line I added to make the gums stand out.

Here’s the other side.

Next, I conquer the eyes. The eyes are the most nerve wracking part of the whole mini. If you get the eyes wrong, the mini just won’t look right. Since it’s a red dragon, I want nice fiery eyes. The color yellow often has problems covering darker colors, I start by painting the eyes white.

I then paint the eye with shades of yellow and orange. (I used about four shades to pull this off.) The center of the eye is yellow, the outer edge is orange.

I next add a thin horizontal stripe for the eye’s pupil.

So far, I’ve painted the eye larger than what is on the miniature. The final step is to outline the eye with a dark red line, covering up any of the eye that spilled over to the skin.

Now my attention turns to the horns. I start by painting the edges with dark brown.

I continue with thin shades of mahogany brown and cork brown to get the approximate gradient correct.

I continue to lighten the horns, and I eventually do some wet blending to get them pretty close to how I want them.

Here’s the other side of the head.

I next start shading the red scales on the rest of the face. This involves painting a lot of shadows. I also paint a gradient on the ear flaps, making it darker at the edges.

I paint the horns black.

The final highlight is made with pink, but that ends up being slightly too bright. I paint over the pink with a thin layer of red to make the transition less garish.