Here be Dragons

The terrain I posted a week or so ago finished with a vaguely concealed promise to paint up some dragons, so that the dreary ruined castles had something chirpy to brighten them up a bit. 

So here's a Black Dragon, obviously. 

This is a repainted bit of Reaper lead. Actual lead! I'd forgotten the weighty joy of hefting it in my non-painting hand! So much so that now I've got a mildly inflamed wrist. Got to stay in shape, man. Gotta hit the benches before I go back to lead. 

It's being repainted not because it desperately needed it, as it's really not changed very much at all, more that I decided to base it. It was that or glue the wings back on for the twelfth time after it overbalanced again.

So now it's got a nice resin base, courtesy of that nice General Stylus. Everyone knows Black Dragons breath acid (60' line, if you want specifics, thank you DnD). This one has either just done that, or he's eaten something that disagreed with him.

Hurrrulllk! Splat. 

As well as the aesthetic of it, the base also gives me a useful monster proxy for WFB games. It's not inconceivable I might try and claim this was a Manticore or a Chaos Dragon, for example, with the rider using an invisibility cloak. Just in case there was a Woffboot coming up, and a chap happened to need such a thing, you know how it goes.

However! This is getting off the point. No ruined castle toppers so far, right? Well, look no further. Here's the second dragon, one for the Welsh Nationalist amongst our audience.

Draig Cymru

Narthrax is the name of this dragon, according to Reaper. They should know, they sculpted him. I would quite like to have one of each Chromatic Dragon variant in my collection before I retire. Performing the classics is very much in my training, after all. With Black done, I moved on to Red.

Say ah.

Reds are firebreathers. I wanted this one to look like he was about to vent, with a kind of build-up of heat in the chest and neck. It's not too bad - the first draft was a bit too pale, so I waited a d4 turns and tried again with a wash of red ink round the edges that helped a lot.

The wings are so big, I felt they needed something to break them up a bit. Dark blue mottling for that, although it's maybe a bit too well-defined and crisp on the edges compared to what I was aiming for. I know I could go back over it, but there's a point sometimes (often) when I decide that trying to fix anything else might just break what I've managed so far.

Narthrax is big. Very big. So big, that he's only the second biggest of the dragons in my Reaper box, and it's that one that actually fits on top of the towers from the last post, so this whole thing has been a great big waste of your reading time in terms of showing a completed diorama. But I haven't settled on the colour for that big one yet, so that's for another time.

In closing, then, a few snaps of the full model and a weak promise to do more later!

Scale comparison. The dragon has more.