PETER PAINTS: THE RED DRAGON, PART 7

Hello! I’m Peter Lee, a designer in R&D for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast. Welcome to what I think is the penultimate article chronicling my progress on painting Gale Force Nine’s red dragon miniature. Last week, I painted most of the dragon’s body. Today, I finish painting the tail and forearms.

The tail of the miniature has a set of frills that look similar to the dragon’s head. Here’s a picture of the head to remind you:

Notice how I painted the frills to fade from red to black. I was to do a similar effect on the tail. This is what it looks like when I started.

The first thing I do is outline the frills with dark red.

Using five or so shades of red, I blend the colors from light red to dark red.

Here’s the other side. Note that I’m just working on the skin between the spines; the spines themselves will be done in just a bit.

Now I start working on the rest of the tail. There are deep ridges near the base of the tail, so I first outline those in dark red.

I shade the rest of the tail in several shades of dark red, applying the darkest shades on the bottom. This is also the point I work on the spines along the back of the tail.

I finish up the tail with red highlights. (There is a chance that I’ll do further highlighting once I’m done with the entire dragon and can take the whole thing in at once.)

Now for the forearms. I start with the right forearm. When I attached the dragon to the base, I needed a small amount of green stuff to hide the gap. I paint over that with dark red first.

Next, I paint under the plates on the forearm with dark red.

I paint over the paints with a few shades of dark red paint.

Once I get the overall color dark enough, I highlight. Once I finish up the right arm, I start on the left arm, painting in the sides of the plates with dark red.

Here’s more of the left arm in progress.

I finish highlighting the left arm, completing my work on the dragon’s body.

Here’s a view of the whole dragon!

That’s it for today! Next week, I plan on finishing up the miniature by completing the wings.  In the meantime, feel free to watch my progress on twitter by following @minipete. Thanks!