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!