On the Painting Table: Wood Elf Dragon!

And welcome to my one hundredth post!

And to celebrate, get a load of the latest addition to my Wood Elf army:

I've never had a dragon in Warhammer before and although the High Elf one is great, I'm not super keen on the Wood Elf one. And I don't own High Elves. Yet.

This little chap is a Tood McFarlane Dragon that I've repainted and rebased to suit my needs. He wasn't my favourite McFarlane dragon but was close to the top of the list - and I got him for £2.60 off eBay!

I was a bit worried he would be out of scale but I think he's fine. Maybe he's a little on the big side but as long as I don't put him up against another (GW) dragon then it'll be fine. And who cares basically! He looks great and makes a beautiful centrepiece for the army.

You can search for "McFarlane Kommodo Dragon" on Google to see the original colour scheme and base. Although the base he came on was almost exactly right for a Warhammer monster base, I needed him to be able to attack a unit directly in front of him and those wings of his jutted too far forward.

A quick trip out to the garden later and I had enough shale to glue into a stack he could perch on, raising the height so that his wings didn't intrude on units in front. Don't ask me about the steel pins that stuck out of his feet. They were horrificially difficult to cut through!

Now the dragon in the army book is of course ridden by a Word Elf Lord. This wasn't a conversion I felt like doing so decided to go with the idea of leaving a space on the dragon's base with room for my current Wood Elf Lord to stand: the idea being that he's perhapsd just jumped off to kick ass.

Painting the dragon was pretty quick but he didn't start to look good until quite near the end (I got a little worried). Using a fairly large artist's brush (pack of five from the local pound shop), I dry-brushed him through the following colours. As the colours got lighter I focused more on the upper areas and the centre of the wings' membranes.

1. Scorched Brown
2. Calthan Brown
3. Graveyard Earth
4. Kommando Khaki
5. Bleached Bone

He looked alright but needed more contrast so I picked out his armoured spine with black and an Adeptus Battlegrey drybrush. The eyes are Red Gore with a Blood Red highlight and the tongue is Liche Purple followed by Warlock Purple.

For the stomach I did Desert Yellow and Bubonic Brown. This looked a little bright so I stuck an Ogryn Flesh wash over it to darken it down. 

For the rocks I painted them black as usual then Adeptus Battlegrey, before giving them a Codex Grey and Fortress Grey drybrush highlight.

Now this guy is really nice and I'm really looking forward to seeing him in action. I have a game lined up day after tomorrow when he'll get his first outing against my Dwarfs, so tune in for that. I'll post the battle report as usual as well as a strategic review, which should be interesting.

By the way... You may be amused to learn that after taking all these pictures, within five seconds the base broke and the rocks cracked apart.

D'oh!

But he's okay again now thank God!