Timor

This will have been the 2nd dragon I've painted for Action Games Miniatures' Drake game.  The Timor dragon of the Mountain Lords (formerly Garrick) faction is a monstrous mass of flesh, muscle and bad attitude.  While not as physically large as the Garrick dragon himself, the Timor is no less fierce in melee and damage potential.

The model I received to paint was one of the first run test casts for the Timor, and therefore was an off-colored white resin cast.  The gaps and mold lines weren't perfect in these earlier runs but I did my best to cover them up.  I'm really not great with green stuff and putty etc but thats a topic I'm thinking about writing a separate blog post about.

The model is really open for an artist's interpretation.  It has wonderfully sculpted smooth surface areas of muscle and wing tissue with some minor detailed spines on the back of the neck progressing into larger spikes down the back ending in a clubbed, stegosaurus type tail.  The face features some spines jutting from the cheeks and ram's horns curling forward.  After a brief color scheme talk with Ben, AGM's director, I decided I wanted to have a pretty simple 'backdrop' to the flesh of this model done exclusively with the airbrush with free handed, brushed on scales in various places that draw the eye to key points of the model and break up the monotony of the smooth airbrushed flesh.

I started by priming the model Army Painter's grey primer.  I then applied VMA Light Brown to the entire model except the horns, spines, and  base.  I then shaded the model with VMA Medium Brown until satisfied with the results.  I went back with VMA Light Brown to hit key areas I wanted to be lighter.  Simple!

Now on to the fun part.  I started with P3's Umbral Umber and 'penciled' in where I wanted all the scales to be.  I focused on areas around the existing, pre sculpted scales on the back of the dragon's neck, shoulders, thighs, head, wings, and back.  This took quite a while as you can imagine, especially considering I did about 5 layers on EACH scale.  The finished product is quite something though.

I slowly shaded every scale starting with pure P3 Sanguine Base followed by pure P3 Skorne Red followed by pure P3 Khador Red followed by pure P3 Khador Red Highlight.  I found that with such a small area to work on like an individual scale you don't necessarily need to do any separate stages in between pre manufactured colors, so no mixing involved. 

It was about this time when I had an epic brush fail x2.  I recently decided to crack open a new GW brush because after finishing my Empire army I wanted to throw away my previous brush that I'd contaminated with metallic colors used on armor plates.  However, the brush I opened was horribly frayed and would NOT shape back together to my annoyance.  I decided to put it aside for now as time was a factor and I opened a 2nd brush I had sitting around.   This brush ALSO had the same problem.  I'm wondering if the factory forgot to put on the gum arabic to shape the bristles or what.  Not having any gum arabic lying around at home to use, I had to head to DeSerres and ended up spending a bunch of money on a Windsor & Newton brush.  I really forgot how awesome those brushes truly are.. so impressed.  It seems before I took them for granted.

At this stage, I was debating painting the horns the traditional bone color but thought it may be too similar to the skin tone so I went with a stark contrasting black highlighted up with P3 Coal Black and P3 Trollblood Base.  Simple yet effective.  As for the base of the model, it has some nicely sculpted rocky areas and some areas that are assumed to be dirt.  I did a couple layers of drybrushing greys and browns and ended up with something I felt was dusty and natural enough.  Some premade static grass clumps from army painter were added and 'she' was done!  I had to quickly take pictures in my crappy little light box before one of Ben's men came to pick it up for photographing.  It was nice knowing you Timor!  By the way this model is fucking HUGE!  Airbrushes are definitely suggested.

My next project is for a friend.  It's a Dwarf King on Bear from Scibor miniatures.  Pretty excited to paint this as its a pure awesome model and it'll mean back to NMM for a bit hurray!