Paint Yer Dragon

I painted this lovely beastie for the Monster Painting Competition over on The Warhammer Forum.
I actually wasn't going to enter as a) I missed the deadline and b) with all the high quality airbrushing and photography skills on display in that thread mine looked a bit Readers Wives to their Playboy.
But it wasn't about winning, and I'm very happy with the paintjob, so I entered anyway.

Click to biggify

I have a long history with this model. I fell in love with it when it first came out back in 1987 (I think) and was given one for Christmas - I have quite a strong memory of leaving the WD open at the page with it on around the house in late November.

I lovingly painted mine Blue (probably Enchanted) after first giving the white undercoat a purple wash following some advice in WD that suggested this "underwashing" was the new technique all the cool kids were doing - anyone else remember this? I don't remember it dramatically improving things.

For some years after this it was at the centrepiece of my 3rd Ed Warhammer Elf army which was filled with Jes Goodwin Elf models, including some of those that had the early seperate plastic spears, Skarlocs Wood Elf Archers (that I painted red!?), wardancers and the sea elf bolt throwers on wheels - a fantastic range of models. I didn't play many games as this was around the time of my "lost years" at university where sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll rather replaced tiny lead men in my affections. However my dragon did get a mention in White Dwarf when my college chum's undead army appeared in the magazine and he reported how he had just added a zombie dragon after a nasty experience against an Elf Dragon (mine!).

Sadly between house moves and storage and whatnot it got lost, or broken, or taken to a jumble sale by my Mum and sold for pittance. Whatever, I no longer owned it.

Fast forward fifteen or so years and in my then role as Head of Mail Order at GW I'm looking around for some great old models to add back into the range for the web store. Someone suggests some of the old dragons and I say "all right but you have to include the Dragonmasters model". There was some resistance as I recall, but as Mel Brooks says in "History of the World" "It's good to be the king" and so the model was included in the re-releases. So I bought one. (And you can do the same if you like, thanks to me).

And then it sat in it's mail order box until Storm of Magic came around along with the competition and I thought "somewhere in my loft I have the model I want to paint and I know the exact colour scheme, too".

So, here she is in all her glory and I'm very glad to have her back.