Reaper Bones Dragon Ebonwrath Part 3

 I am charging ahead with this miniature at a cracking pace.

Click to enlarge

Sometimes, when i'm painting I get very inspired and can work quite quickly, others it drags and it can take me ages to finish.  This one is the former and i'm pretty confident its going to be finished in the next few days as long as I get some brush time over the weekend.

Click to enlarge

So i've completed the base, which I really like.  And i'm about half way through painting the dragon.  She's got her base colours and washes but the next stage is detailing her scales, talons, and horns and the highlights.

I looked for some inspiration when I was choosing colours and the picture of a Black snake (below) was the one I found that came closest to how I wanted the scales to look. Black is a difficult colour to paint, if you stick with black grey and white it looks dull but if you add too much colour it can look unreal, at least when I do it does.

I chose a dark blue/grey base coat for the scales with a heavy wash of black.  This gave me the dark mid-tone and the deep shadows to contrast it I was after but without having to paint every scale individually or needing to resort to heavy drybrushing.  The highlights will be provided by a very light drybrush of pure white (if you look at the snake you'll see the white on the edges is quite bright and has little in the way of blended transitions). This sharp contrast makes the scales look glossy.

As I mentioned in an earlier post this is the first Dragon i've painted in a long long time and it does present some difficulties when painting.  

Click to enlarge

I had to decide at what point to attach the wings and when to fix it to the base. Normally I don't put together a miniature if it would make it harder to paint but the wing's needed some greenstuff to cover some gaps and I didn't think they would be too much of an obstruction.  

That wouldn't have been a problem if I had thought it through but once i'd done that I realised that to soften the legs so they would fit flat onto the rock I would have to heat them and that might ruin the paint job so I decided i would have to fit it to the base as well.

That gave me two problems, first the necessity of Olympic grade wrist contortionism to get to the underbelly and secondly the sheer weight of holding the dragon, a block of wood and a great big stone for the duration of the paint job.

Next time I will engage brain before glue.

The picture below is as far as i've got, more updates soon.

Click to enlarge