I've been making tentative first steps to painting my first large model for over a decade this week.
The model in question is a dragon, which will be used as either the "bog-standard" Dragon or Smaug depending on the scenario (I'd love the actual Smaug figure from GW but I'm not forking out £300 on it - I could by a couple of armies for that.
Instead, the model I am using is an old Grenadier figure from the eighties, Teronus the Ultimate Dragon. It was out of production for a good few years but an Italian company called Mirliton miniatures has resumed production of the old Grenadier figures.
For me, Teronus is the nicest metal dragon I've ever seen. I would like the wings to be a bit bigger but otherwise he is just perfect, a really crisp sculpt with incredible detail to the scales and a really characterful face and "rampant" stance as if he is in the middle of combat swatting some pesky hero. Easily my favourite miniature dragon ever. He just looks all kinds of fierce.
While he's no Smaug, he's rather big and bulky too....
I assembled this model about ten years ago, taking care to drill and pin all the pieces to ensure a very firm join, as everything is metal and the model is quite bulky. I mounted it on one of the GW oval bases.
Now, Smaug is red or golden in the films, but I wanted my dragon to be a classic green. I just have a thing for green dragons and the first image I ever saw of this figure in the Grenadier catalogue so long ago was green and I really liked that.
So I dusted it off and sprayed the whole thing with a green primer. The specific spray I used was Reed from the Montana Gold range. I really like these sprays as they come in a huge variety of colours and cover figures really well. Being able to choose a base colour rather than black or white really helps painting quickly, especially when batch-painting troops as you can choose a base colour to match the most prominent colour on the figures.
In this case, the colour is similar to GW Camo Green. I forgot to get a pic at this stage.
I then inked over the whole thing with a mix of black and dark green inks. This actually looked really good, and gave the figure a very nice colour similar to some crocodiles. The inks brought out all the details amazingly well.
I was tempted to leave the green like that, but it just looked a little dark and messy and it was not really the rich shade of green I really wanted.
My first attempt was to paint each scale with Dark Angels Green and highlight that with Snot Green and then extreme highlights of Goblin Green. Over this, the same mix of black and green inks, only more watered down was applied. This was nice but after some reflection it was still a bit too dark and boring (my painting light makes it look brighter than it is).
