The Very Big Plastic Talisman Dragon

 Last week I started quite a large repair project. Many, many years ago - well, in the 90s - Games Workshop made their first plastic dragon. It was sculpted by the great Trish Carden, and had the same - somewhat controvertial - S-shaped body as the older metal dragons of the 90s. It originally cropped up in the Talisman board game, and then featured as the mount for a renegade elf lord in the Dogs of War mercenary army for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. The basic plastic body was then used, with extra metal parts, as the dragon mount for several other characters.

And I own one! Well, I own most of one. I bought this thing ages ago to convert into a sort of Eldar Exodite riding beast: as I've observed before on this blog, not much is cooler than a bunch of space elves riding a dinosaur. But I thought it would be nice to repair this monster as part of the Bretonnian army project. After all, not only do knights traditionally fight dragons, but you could take dragons in the original Bretonnian army book. How cool is that?

I took the model apart and bathed it in dettol to lose most of the paint. Then, because it was missing some of its spikes, I made new spines out of a green stuff/milliput mixture sculpted around a piece of wire. Here is a work in progress shot, although it's hard to make much out.

The next problem was that I needed some wings. I found some old plastic wings on ebay. They were decent enough but the "shoulder" connection was a mess. That meant that I had to improvise with wire and various clays to pin the wings to the body. The mold lines were pretty awful, and cutting them away and smoothing over the joins with milliput took a while. I'm still far from sure that I got them all.

Then for the painting! I went with red because it's a classic dragon colour, and the colour used for the Talisman dragon. This thing is massive: it's probably a quarter bigger than the older metal S-shaped dragons. I used a mixture of blending, washes and contrast paint for the dragon, along with some careful highlighting. I'd forgotten how much of a pain wings are to paint.

The original base for this model is a large, ugly square thing - used, I believe, only for this model. It's not very nice, and I gave the dragon a bigger base instead. Various leftovers were used to make broken signs and trees to give the base some variety, including a plastic snail from the Bretonnians, which is probably invisible now.

Here he is.

He's big.

This thing actually wasn't too hard to paint: no fiddly details, and no faces. On the minus side, all that red did start to drive me a bit crazy. Still, he'll look good looming over my knights!

A Quick Knightly Update

 So, in a way it's been a quiet week for painting. Actually, I've spent a lot of time doing repair work on a very old plastic dragon, and I hope to post more about this next week. One of the good things about doing all this oldhammer stuff is that I can finally do justice to the old models that I've got, and the dragon is definitely one of them. Oh, and it's pretty cheap.

Anyhow, in lieu of anything else, here are the two units of knights that I've painted. The first unit comes from miniatures released in 1991 - plastic horses and metal riders.

The second is made of plastic knights from the Battlemasters game, which came out in 1992. They're almost all the same miniature.

Knights are cool. I see that North Star Miniatures have just released a set of "Bohemian knights", who would make brilliant oldhammer-style Bretonnian foot knights. It will be difficult not to buy some. We'll see - it's not as if I've not got things to get on with!

The Duc de Bordleaux

 I've not painted many things this week, but the main thing that I did paint took a while. Back in White Dwarf 138, there was a unit of Bretonnian knights. Most of them were quite simply painted, but their leader, the Duc de Bordleaux, was converted and had much more complex heraldry.

Being an idiot, I decided to make my own version.

Cutting the horse to rear up was more complex than it ought to have been. Keeping the legs the same length meant that one foot was higher than the other, and I had to raise the model's base with plasticard to keep the horse level (the original model is standing on a tactical rock for the same reason). I then pinned it for stability.

The original GW model has reins made from paper. I always find that paper starts to look tacky very quickly, so I used very thin plastic from a blister pack, twisted into shape.

The only other alteration was the addition of a plastic sword. Somewhere in time, the Duc's (rather small) mace had disappeared. I think that the new sword looks good.

And then I painted him. Ye gods, this was fiddly and slow. I used a brighter blue than GW, to match the rest of my knights, and simplified the paint scheme a little. Otherwise, I tried to stick to the original scheme as much as possible, and it was not easy. I've painted smaller details on the Escher and eldar harlequin models, but all this freehand was tiring, especially since I was trying to duplicate the same images on different parts of the model.

I reached a point where I was just unable to get it any better. I would correct a mistake and, in doing so, make a new one. So this is as good as he's going to get - which isn't bad, to my mind. At the end of the day, I'm pleased with this guy.

Back to Blognia - "Napoleonic" cavalry and randoms

 And now for something completely different.

It's been a while since I looked at the charming principality of Blognia and its wretched inhabitants. While there has been a Blognian army for time immemorial, its main function has been to fight itself in an endless cycle of banditry and civil war. Now that the Arch-Duchess has effectively declared war on the undead, the army is having to actually do something useful.

The cavalryman here is actually an English Civil War soldier, with a crest added from a Napoleonic helmet. I'm not sure where the sword arm came from, and I sculpted him some suitably grandiose epaulettes. The horse's head is from a medieval knight.

The Blognian Cavalry has a long history. Traditionally, many aristocrats have either gone into the cavalry or some kind of mental institution. Indeed, few people have the skill or patience to put up with the notoriously foul-tempered horses, and it is said that the heavy armour cavalrymen wear is largely to protect them from their noble steeds.

That said, the cavalry is not entirely useless. At the tenth battle of the River Plob, the Grand Imperial Lancers charged a unit of Swedish mercenaries, thus turning the course of the battle. Although the River Plob was in the way, the lancers drowned so spectacularly that the rest of the Blognian army was able to retreat in good order. 

Also joining this rider is an infantryman - well, an infantry person, really. Blognia operates a "don't ask, don't tell" policy as far as the gender of it soldiers goes: not out of equal opportunities but because it's desperate for absolutely anyone to sign up. This particular soldier is either unusually disciplined or hasn't had time to lose bits of her uniform and acquire more confortable kit yet.

Here is the entire army unit, so far. 

And here are some crazy pagans. The woman with the massive sword was inspired by a character from the cancelled computer game Fable Legends, which featured a Lady of the Lake armed with an enormous sword. The legs of this model were from a dark eldar mandrake. The arms and head are Frostgrave, and the body was sculpted by me. Overall, a really enjoyable little project.

The person with the antlers is an odd kitbash. The arms and head are from Frostgrave cultists. The body is a Perry Miniatures Afghan. I think he's some kind of deranged cultist, perhaps about to do magic with his raised hand. 

Well, that was fun!