Prince Tûrion Rilyalocë and the Golden Drake Laurëdrauginir

[Prince of Spires]

Nice!

I actually like the before and after picture for the NNM. It's great to see how well it works. They look very deadly indeed.

Thank you! Yah the process is important to display because it looks terrible until it doesn’t

Indeed! It very much looks like a case of "trust the process".

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Nice!

I actually like the before and after picture for the NNM. It's great to see how well it works. They look very deadly indeed.

Thank you! Yah the process is important to display because it looks terrible until it doesn’t

Indeed! It very much looks like a case of "trust the process".

Thank you so much for releasing me from that Illusion Hex haha! Yes it looks like garbage untl the hotspots are added, and must be seen through, kinda like a quest. faith in the goal is rewarded if you can endure the trials.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

I was temporarily caught in an account recovery vortex, but I have been busy.

The grisaille is done for both Swordmasters and Dragon Princes. I’ll be finishing the Reavers tonight. Then only the Seaguard need to be assembled and light sketched before I can hit the table.

My plan is to paint a model or 3 per session as my interest directs me. Until then they counted as painted ethereal haha

[Turion Rilyaloce]

And here are the light sketches for my Dragon Princes

[Anduil of Elithis]

Really nice models! Though they feel more like Silver Helms to me due to a lack of dragon details.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Really nice models! Though they feel more like Silver Helms to me due to a lack of dragon details.

I agree and I think that was also the designers intent. I bought them off an online print shop, and I guess that particular shop didn’t have the Dragon Prince equivalent. I have since found them on other shops but I had no idea when ordering. I won’t be running Silver Helms and it might be a while until I make another order.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Here is what the Dragon Princes from the alternative range look like.

[Anduil of Elithis]

Here is what the Dragon Princes from the alternative range look like.

These do look like Dragon Princes, indeed. But since you are not planning to run Silver Helms, there should be no confusion anyway.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Here is what the Dragon Princes from the alternative range look like.

These do look like Dragon Princes, indeed. But since you are not planning to run Silver Helms, there should be no confusion anyway.

The shame overcame me and I’ve ordered the real deal, along with some White Lions haha

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Some Seaguard blocks are shaping up. 2x19 is exactly 500 pts with upgrades haha

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Had my first game today, absolutely awesome.

Fitting my first game stoked some rage seeing 2 pathetic Wyverns across the table.

My list was less focused than I would probably play to win all I can, I threw a level 2 mage in to see if that had some play. She went in a block of 29 Seaguard with Razor banner and chose elementalism. While I was able to get a lot of spells off and play out of range of his wizards the fact I had to do that meant I wasn’t using her to try and dispel. He had 4 magic users all desperately trying to debuff my dragons.

Speaking of between making big blocks of NGs flee before they could release fanatics with Terror and taking horrendous punishment but still shrugging it off, I’m going to lean more into them by taking the mage out probably. I was max kitted for O or D and still performed really well.

The bolt thrower was as discussed, just 1 might as well be none, I’m thinking you need a battery to see returns.

But most importantly Caledor took to the skies again. What a sight. Other players travelled from distant boards to view the Golden Drake before I packed up haha

[Anduil of Elithis]

Glad to hear you could find time for a game and bringing your beautifully painted models to the table. Looks like you had fun!

But I hope you punished that abominable orc for enslaving one of our noble dragons!

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Glad to hear you could find time for a game and bringing your beautifully painted models to the table. Looks like you had fun!

But I hope you punished that abominable orc for enslaving one of our noble dragons!

Thank you. Special attention was payed to the imposters.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Anduil of Elithis made a very good point about the Cavalry looking much more like Silver Helms, and it was good advice. I picked up the real proxies and they are definitely better models and more in line with a Caledor theme.

This is why I started the Plog to get valuable feedback

[Turion Rilyaloce]

I also picked up some White Lions, nice touch making the unit Champion an ode to Korhil.

I’m going to try them as a guerrilla unit darting out of terrain to charge or inviting units into the terrain to fight them.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

On based and ready to paint. I’m really excited as they like painting pseudo dragons haha.

[Anduil of Elithis]

Really beautiful sculpts. I look forward to seeing what they look like painted by you!

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Really beautiful sculpts. I look forward to seeing what they look like painted by you!

Thank you for that confidence and for the advise!

[Turion Rilyaloce]

This is gonna be fun. These are really nice sculpts I haven’t even really minded batch painting them which says something.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

The Dragon fever is seeping over into other niche areas.
There has been discussion of a Warden of Saphery Noble on flying carpet in the forum, which is really intriguing to me as I need to deal with mages that have debuff spells to threaten my Dragons, or war machines.

So how to adapt this to my Caledorian theme? @Axiem found this model, and I’ll be printing it to have a 25mm frontage on the rebase elements.

I’m counting it as the flying carpet, and yelling “NIIIIIGHTTT FURRRRRYYYYY Vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvboooom” every time I declare a charge.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

First couple layers of highlights down.

I love the transparency method and being able to do this by drybrush in the middle stages. I used to do blending from start to finish and it was soul crushing.

This way I find I’m banging out entire units in record time and achieving more or less the same outcome by controlling the gradient with glazes in the last steps

[Althran]

Absolutely stunning models !
Would you mind describing the method of painting you are using on those dragon princes or linking to a tutorial with it ?

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Absolutely stunning models !
Would you mind describing the method of painting you are using on those dragon princes or linking to a tutorial with it ?

Yes, so it’s a combination of techniques learned over time. I started out doing NMM the Darren Latham way. He’s the best I’ve seen at it, but he also paints a lot of single miniatures for display, and I found that while having complete control, it’s too much for an army.

Then I found Marco Frisoni who was an advocate of using Grisaille in combination with transparent paint.

My approach combines these by using the Frisoni approach first and then transitioning to the Latham one to finish.

First you prime the model black. Then using a white opaque Ink you airbrush from above where the light source would be. This is called a Grisaille or Light Sketch. It gives you your values (how bright the highlight are) and volumes (how these values are distributed over the surface contours of the model) and is your black shadows, white highlights, and grey mid tones as the airbrush is a natural gradient tool.

This really speeds up the process of trying to achieve perfect gradients with a brush, which while possible, is in my opinion not the right tool for the job. You can clean a gymnasium with a tooth brush but why would you when you have a self propelled floor cleaner?

Once the light sketch is complete, you now need to tint your model to add colour over the values and volumes. I’ve seen a lot of people use Zenithal priming and then cover it with opaque acrylic paint. This is going to provide negligible effect in my opinion. We need to use paints that are transparent to show our previous work instead of use paints designed for coverage.

For gold I use a contrast paint Aggaros Dunes. It is related to Sepia if you wanted to use Inks. For silver I use Gryph charger grey for the cool tones. When using contrast paints you want to keep the paint moving almost like when you squeegee your car windows. Start from one side of a surface working your way across but not back tracking, and finishing to the opposite edge before it dries. Never paint over it while it’s still drying as it will leave streaks.

It is important to note that while these paints are transparent, everything has a little bit of opacity. So when you do your light sketch I recommend making the values 15 percent brighter than you want your finished ones to be because this filter step will tone them down.

Once the Grisaille and tint are done, I dry brush the first three layers of highlights on. Later we are going to smooth it out with glazes so I stopped trying to worry about precise blends here. This is the stage of the Dragon Princes above.

For Gold it’s Zamesi Desert > Bleached Bone > Screaming Skull. For Silver it’s Administratum Grey > Ulthuan Grey. Make sure to cover less of each edge as you go up and only the upward most edges as you go through these. Where you might drybrush 70 percent of the model on the first round, by the last it might be 20.

Once these are done, I glaze the gold with Transparent Raw Sepia. This ties all the highlights together. Then we go back and do the shading by glazing from mid tones into shadows. For gold it’s bloodletter, and for Silver it’s very thinned down Incubi Darkness.

Once this is complete, it’s time for final highlights with a brush, and then hot spots with pure white. The final highlights are placed only in the edges most likely to be hit by light. Then the hot spots are a single dot of paint placed a couple times along this. It really makes the effect pop and look like it’s shining.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Here is an example of the first glazing stage. It has 2 purposes.

One is to unify the highlights and clean up the drybrush marks.

Two is to punch colour back into the gold. When you are building up using browns, and beiges it can tend to look wooden.

The next step is a red glaze that only goes into the shadows and provides some depth and contrast.

[Althran]

First of all thank you for an amazingly in depth painting tutorial! I think this combination of grisaille (slapchop?), NMM and glazes is something quite unique and interesting! Did you come up with that yourself?

The painting results clearly speak for themself, and I will be giving it an attempt after my current projects (infinite armour scales on swordmasters) is finished.
I dont have an airbrush, but I think a similar initial value sketch might be achievable with rattle can primers for the black and white. I have some follow up questions if you dont mind:
1) Your dragon rider armour seems to have significantly warmer gold which I much prefer than the others, why is that ? Is that just the final look or are you using a colder gold on the spearman.
2) Like my steel to be quite blueish, what would be some alterations to the recipe to achieve a more blue steel color ?
3) How do you handle mistakes? Meaning when you get to the final glazing and edge highlighting after producing such sublte color shifts how do you handle a overly thick edge highlight or a misplaced dot?

[Turion Rilyaloce]

First of all thank you for an amazingly in depth painting tutorial! I think this combination of grisaille (slapchop?), NMM and glazes is something quite unique and interesting! Did you come up with that yourself?

The painting results clearly speak for themself, and I will be giving it an attempt after my current projects (infinite armour scales on swordmasters) is finished.
I dont have an airbrush, but I think a similar initial value sketch might be achievable with rattle can primers for the black and white. I have some follow up questions if you dont mind:
1) Your dragon rider armour seems to have significantly warmer gold which I much prefer than the others, why is that ? Is that just the final look or are you using a colder gold on the spearman.
2) Like my steel to be quite blueish, what would be some alterations to the recipe to achieve a more blue steel color ?
3) How do you handle mistakes? Meaning when you get to the final glazing and edge highlighting after producing such sublte color shifts how do you handle a overly thick edge highlight or a misplaced dot?

You can do the Grisaille with a rattle can it just won’t be as smooth. You may be able to feather it out with the glazes but I’m not sure because I have never tried.

It’s my own technique, but is a combination of things I have taken from the artists I mentioned to speed up my process for army scale projects.

1. On the spearmen I think I may have missed the yellow glaze, they have some quite brown shadows. I’ll probably go back over that when I do the unit.

2. For bluish steel add thunderhawk blue before the administratum grey. I did it like this when I did full blends with a brush.

3. I don’t really make those mistakes. I think that starts with using really thin paint. I pass once in each direction perpendicular to the edge so they are pretty uniform. The hot spots I go slowly to make sure they are not misplaced. And once you’ve done it a bunch you get really used to where they should be.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

You can now see contrast start to pop as I fill in the highlights by brush.

This part is mentally taxing, I can only do 3 models before I have to take a break. Better to do that than get sloppy and risk burn out.

Last part of gold will be a final highlight on only upward facing edges and then the hot spots.

[Turion Rilyaloce]

I’ve begun blocking in the purple. I’m really happy with the color distribution, and I cannot wait to do the blacks whites.

Though subassembly is necessary, it’s always great to have the base coats done and be able to paint as a complete model.

[Althran]

Yeah unfortunately I dont own an airbrush, mostly because I live in a small apartment and dont have the space and I worry about the compression noise.

So the dragon princes will come out the same as the dragon rider? That would look incredible.
Not making mistakes is the most surefire way of avoiding clean-up haha.
I wonder what other contrast paints would be interesting to try with a similar technique for brass, bronze or torquise.
The models are already looking incredible, you should definitely do an army shot when you can !

[Turion Rilyaloce]

Yeah unfortunately I dont own an airbrush, mostly because I live in a small apartment and dont have the spaces and I worry about the compression noise.

So the dragon princes will come out the same as the dragon rider? That would look incredible.
Not making mistakes is the most surefire way of avoiding clean-up haha.
I wonder what other contrast paints would be interesting to try with a similar technique for brass, bronze or torquise.
The models are already looking incredible, you should definitely do an army shot when you can !

I know you can get quiet compressors, but work with what you have. You just may need to make some adjustments.

The DPs should come out similar to dragon riders but those were all hand painted start to finish so the blends won’t be as defined.

For different colours it should work as long as they are transparent and as you said contrast paint then yep. If it was a colour not a metal I would go ink though. They have much more saturation without opacity.

I haven’t even thought of an army shot. I’ve got 2 games this weekend so maybe I can remember