WIP: High Elf Dragonlord Part 1

Today I show you another WIP, one which has been kept hidden for a very long time. I started this conversion in December 2010. At the time, I was painting the High Elves Sea Guard, so I was in the middle of one of my deepest motivation spikes for my High Elves army. Remember my High Elf Army project? Check it out so far:

• Tribute to the Fallen
• High Elves Sea Guard
• Swordmasters of Hoeth (in progress)

This new WIP was left aside just a month after I started it, so this miniature has been kept stored since then, away from the sunlight, patiently waiting its turn... until now, when I have decided to get back with old WIPs. This is a very ambitious project, and will be one of the central pieces of my High Elves. Let's get started!

Before we start let me say something... I LOVE DRAGONS. I've always loved those creatures. They are simply AWESOME. But Games Workshop has never released any dragon kit that deserved any pride on their part. Since the dragons of the old Fantasy editions, terribly awful, one after another they just released clones of the same horrible miniature. However, a few years ago, GW decided to release a new plastic dragon kit which could have been a new beginning on their relationship with the creature. It was a good kit, I can't say the contrary, but it had the same flaws which you can find in 90% of Games Workshop miniatures. If you assemble it right out of the box you get a nice miniature, not very fancy, but OK for gaming purposes. And this is not enough. So here's me trying to get something interesting out of this kit.


The first thing I realised when I saw the plastic dragon, was that the jaw made no sense. The lower jaw was considerably smaller than the upper one. This gives the dragon a weird look, and one of the most important parts of a dragon is the head, it can give the creature all the awesomeness just by itself. Even so, the head in this kit really has a lot of potential and doesn't need too much work. Fortunately, the GW kit comes with two heads, with and withour armour. So I took the lower jaw of the armoured one, and the head of the other one.



Now it does look awesome enough!

Now that I have a cool head to start with, let's see what we can get out of the body. The whole torso comes in two pieces, but this only enables the rigid pose that the boxart shows. I'll cut so I can develop poses a little more.


The same happens with the neck. It is very rigid and straight, really boring stuff. There's nothing really to get out of it, so I'll just use wire and once I'm happy with the pose, I'll model it from scratch. Shouldn't be too difficult!


Wires give you a lot of field to work with. The arms are also really horrible. I'll make larger arms with wire, and attach them to the torso which has also wire to be able to twist the lizard.


I thought it would be cool if the dragon was climbing a rock instead of flying, and once it reached the top, the head moved forward in an intimidating and epic pose. So let's go with that for now. I built a simple rock where the dragon would lean on out of the actual base in the kit and some spare Magic Sculpt putty I had at home which was about to go bad soon.




It has potential! Let's put on some more pieces to see how it looks, the wings and the throne backrest. Obviously, the wings are very important, they are about 70% of the whole miniature, so no way I'm going to put them like the kit encourages you to. So LAME!







So yes... I'm starting to feel it! It really looks cool. I'm pretty convinced with the pose, it is very straightforward. So before I continue, I'll put putty on the wires to fix it for now and keep on progressing from there.



I also added the right leg from the kit, looks like I will be able to use that one, and also some wire for the tail. I think it would be very cool if the tail was wrapped around the rock, and the tails that come with the kit are really dull too, so I'll sculpt that. I don't need putty there, I can leave that for a later stage as it won't affect the whole miniature.





Continue to WIP: High Elf Dragonlord Part 2