I've only read a few Savage Dragon comics, but I've always liked Erik Larsen's design, and the idea of "He wanted to use his powers for good so he joined the police"; a surprisingly novel alternative to the typical superhero trope. So when I came across Prey Studio's amazing interpretation I was instantly enamoured with the realistic yet exaggeratedly-cartoonish sculpt.
Savage Dragon:
This was the biggest statue I've painted, and I had quite a hard time with it. Almost every part of the process was new to me on some level - or at least something I hadn't completely figured out yet - so I learned quite a lot on this one.
I printed him at 1:10 scale, using Anycubic grey resin. While the pieces came pre-supported, there were a few that wouldn't fit my print bed without being re-oriented, meaning I had to generate new supports for a couple of pieces.
After removing supports and curing I assembled the pieces and used Milliput to fill any gaps, before sanding smooth. This might sound simple, but the semi-translucent resin meant it was easy to miss spots, so I actually had to do some more repair work later.
This model was intended as a gift for a friend, but the idea was to help him paint it himself. I wanted to apply with a zenithal to create the shading, and then guide him through the use of glazes and drybrushing to apply colour without losing the shading. I did a bunch of tests on a smaller print in order to pick the best paints for glazing.
So I started by attaching him to a jar lid using hot glue. This would give me something to grip while handling him so I wasn't constantly touching the model surface. I applied a primer coat of Vallejo 73.660 Surface Primer Gloss Black with my airbrush, following by Vallejo 70.990 Model Color Light Grey (thinned with GSW 1880 Airbrush Retarder), then Vallejo 72.701 Game Air Dead White (again thinned with the retarder).
Unfortunately the glazing/drybrushing plan wasn't working out as well as I had hoped. Though it didn't
really matter because my friend ultimately wasn't able to find the time to finish the model with me, so I decided to just paint it for him myself and find something else to paint if he ever had the time to try again. So I stripped off the paint by brushing the model with pure Dettol, then did some more filling and sanding to fix some issues I had missed the first time. Then I primed with Mr. Hobby Aqueous Surfacer 1000 thinned with water, after which I spotted even more issues and did yet more sanding and filling. This time it was easier, as this primer is much better for sanding than the glossy black I was using before (that one tends to peel off when you try to sand, causing issues). After touching up the primer again (which I mistakenly thinned with Mr. Hobby Mr. Color Thinner 110 instead of water this time, though luckily it didn't seem to cause any issues), I was finally ready to actually get started.
This time I was going to apply a coloured zenithal, removing the need for glazes and drybrushes. I applied them all with an airbrush, thinning the paints with the same airbrush retarder, and sometimes thickening paints with Formula P3 Mixing Medium if necessary to get a useable consistency. So I started with Green Stuff World 1796 Acrylic Color Kraken Green.
Next was Citadel Layer Warpstone Glow, sprayed down from around 60 degrees.
Then I used Citadel Layer Moot Green from around 30 degrees, followed by a little bit of Vallejo 72.732 Game Air Escorpena Green from almost directly above.
I applied a couple of layers of Green Stuff World 1748 Liquid Mask over the skin. This was only my second time using masking fluid, and the first time everything went wrong so I was very apprehensive. I used two layers because I thought that would ensure I didn't miss any spots and also make it easier to pull it off cleanly, although now that I've tried it I think maybe thinner layers might peel off more easily with less damage; I will have to experiment more in the future.
I airbrushed the shirt with The Army Painter WP1113 Warpaints Electric Blue.
I was looking for an intermediate blue so I mixed Electric Blue with Citadel Edge Blue Horror (sprayed down from about 45 degrees); afterwards I realised that I probably could have used The Army Painter WP1432 Warpaints Ice Storm, or Formula P3 Frostbite, but at the time I missed them amongst my paints.
I finished with Blue Horror sprayed from almost directly above.
Again I used the GSW Liquid Mask to protect the newly painted area before moving on.
I airbrushed the trousers and tie with a mix of Formula P3 Exile Blue and Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black, although it might have been better if I just used black, since the resulting mix was a desaturated grey that wasn't really much darker than the Exile Blue.
I then sprayed the Exile Blue down from about 60 degrees from vertical.
Then I sprayed Citadel Foundation Mordian Blue down from about 30 degrees. I tried to pick out the upper areas with a touch of The Army Painter WP1115 Warpaints Ultramarine Blue, but I tried to use a gentle touch and the result was... subtle at best. I don't think this ended up having much effect on the final product.
I was out of GSW Liquid Mask, but I found Talens Liquid Masking Film in a local art supply shop. It said it was for watercolours, so I was a little worried, but I didn't have very much choice. The Talens behaved differently to the GSW stuff; it had longer drying times, which in some ways made it easier to use, but it was also harder to tell how thick a layer you had put down as it dried mostly clear, so I applied it very heavily in two coats (at which point it darkened up), requiring a long drying time, so that I could be sure it would be easy to take off. However, when I tried cleaning up a few drops that landed on the base, it felt like some of the colour already there came off with it. So I was actually very worried at this point, but decided to keep going.
The final zenithal colour was a red for the fire hydrant. I tried to use GSW 1832 Redwood Brown for the initial shade colour, but I decided it wasn't dark enough and went over it again with GSW 1831 Choco Brown. This still wasn't really as dark I should have gone, but oh well.
Next I sprayed unthinned Vallejo 72.711 Game Air Gory Red down from about 60 degrees to the vertical.
Then unthinned Vallejo 72.710 Bloody Red from almost straight above.
While the previous airbrushed layers were still protected I tried to create a quick and rough paint chipping effect on the fire hydrant by spattering Scalecolor SC-63 Metal N' Alchemy Black Metal over the red, coming in from the sides, and brushing it rougly across the more damaged looking areas. I repeated this with Vallejo 72.053 Game Color Chainmail Silver, but this time aiming down to catch the upper surfaces (not that I think it made a difference), getting a sort of light drybrush effect on some spots. After I was sure everything was dry, I carefully peeled away the layers of masking fluid. Amazingly the results looked pretty good, with almost no signs of paint being pulled off! The edges were a little rough, but I figured most of the damage would be easy to fix.
I painted the glasses, belt and pouch buckles, watch housing, and badge in some brown or other, then applied Citadel Layer Gehenna's Gold to get a brass/gold colour. I washed this with Citadel Washes Ogryn Flesh, applying several layers in some places. This might have been a mistake, especially on the badge, as I think it's just too much contrast. I carefully painted and/or dryrbushed Gehenna's Gold over the surfaces again, followed by Citadel Layer Auric Armour Gold as a final highlight.
The watch face was Formula P3 Boiler Black, I shaded the rim and painted the hand backing in thinned Vallejo 72.751 Game Air Black, then I painted the hands in Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver. It doesn't exactly look very realistic, but it's OK from a distance, and it probably looks better than a simple blank face would have?
I painted the belt and shoes in Vallejo 70.862 Model Color Black Grey, then edge-highlighted with Vallejo 70.992 Model Color Neutral Grey. I then went over some of the upper-most highlights with Vallejo 70.990 Model Color Light Grey.
I picked out the handcuffs with Vallejo 72.054 Game Color Gunmetal, then washed them along with the grey areas from the previous step using Citadel Shade Nuln Oil. I then highlighted the cuffs with Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver, but that was probably overkill, it looked good with just a wash, and at most highlighting with the original steel probably would have been enough.
There's a painting technique I've been somewhat fascinated by for a while. I've heard it called "Non-Metallic Chrome" or "Sky-Earth Non-Metallic Metal". This technique reminds me of old sci-fi and fantasy artwork, of Boris Vallejo covers and 80's cartoon logos. This seemed to be the prefect time to try it, as it would look much better on Dragon's sunglasses than a solid colour, they were a very simple shape, and finding real-world reference images of mirrored sunglasses was easy enough.
So I basecoated the lenses in Vallejo 72.021 Game Color Magic Blue, then I carefully built up the gradient with various mixes of Magic Blue and Army Painter Electric Blue with water and P3 Mixing Medium.
After that I painted the lower halves with Green Stuff World 1832 Acrylic Color Redwood Brown, then built up a gradient using mixes of the Redwood Brown and Green Stuff World Quicksand Brown, again thinning heavily with water and mixing medium. I tried to leave an outline of Magic Blue along the sky and Redwood Brown along the earth to act as a bit of a "blackline". This was especially important for the brown, as it helped keep the lenses distinct from the golden frames.
I had planned to stop here, but I wasn't convinced and, after discussing it with some forumites on Discord, I went back and hiked up the contrast by brightening the previous blue mixes with P3 Frostbite, and the browns with Vallejo Model Air US Desert Armour 686. Looking back I can see that this was the right choice, as it was a huge improvement.
Technically I probably should have had the lion's share of the lenses reflecting the earth because he's looking down slightly. I did in fact consider this before I started painting, but while I was painting it just felt right to paint more sky. I think it's OK; blue looks nicer than brown, and I would argue it creates the illusion that you're looking up at him (which makes sense since he's kinda big). After I finished I considered trying to paint a "reflection" of a shadowy figure in the lenses, representing the viewer, but decided that was too ambitious for my first attempt at this technique. Maybe another time.
Now came the hard part: fixing up the airbrushed surfaces. I cleaned up the borders, adding some extra shading for the skin and trousers where needed using the original shade colours. That part wasn't too hard, but there were some trouble spots that were not as simple to fix. After some failed attempts at fixing some problems on the trousers, I ended up having to repeat some of the airbrushing on them. I tried to mask off the areas I thought would be at risk, but I wasn't careful enough as some fine splatter of dark blue found it's way onto the front of the shirt. I guess I messed up the paint consistency and/or compressor air pressure? I dunno. I didn't see a way to fix the splatter, so I had to give up and leave it. It's relatively subtle, but if you look closely you'll see it.
After that I decided the creases on the trousers were too dark, so I gave them a light dryrbush with Electric Blue mixed with a bit of Mordian Blue; I think it was around a 6:1 ratio, or maybe even less Mordian Blue. I also used the mix to do a bit of careful edge-highlighting were needed on the trousers and the tie, and also to create a bit of a blend on the upper surfaces of the tie - a touch of dryrbushing with Mordian Blue was needed to smooth the transition. I did a tiny bit of shading in some recesses and along the seams of the trousers using a mix of about 1 drop of black to 4 drops of Exile Blue, along with a lot of water.
There was an area on his Adam's Apple where the masking fluid pulled off the paint. I had a very hard time mixing up colours that matched the surrounding areas to fix it. In the end the secret turned out the be mixing dark greys into the greens, and using glazes of the lighter colours to touch things up where needed; until I tried that the mix always turned out too bright or the colour was too saturated.
Figuring out that little trick turned out to be very useful, as from that point on I had a much easier time mixing colours where needed to fix the skin and shirt.
With the body done, I moved on to the base. I painted most of it in Vallejo 70.992 Model Color Neutral Grey; unfortunately I was very careless and got some splatters onto the top of the shoes. I would have had to repaint parts of the shoes to fix it, but I decided not to; with the ground all broken it did make some sense for his shoes to have some dirt and concrete dust etc. I picked out the girders in Vallejo 72.054 Game Color Gunmetal and dabbed on spots of The Army Painter WP1469 Quickshade Washes Mid Brown to suggest rust. After basecoating the pipe in Scalecolor SC-88 Old Copper, I roughly applied a few spots of Citadel Technical Nihilakh Oxide. The "lower" areas were then painted in a leftover mix of browns (Daler Rowney "Graduate Acrylic" 201 Burnt Sienna, Phoenix Artist's Acrylic Value Series 690 Vandyke Brown, and Phoenix 601 Raw Sienna) that I've had lying around for a while. With all the basecoats down I washed the whole base, including the fire hydrant, with The Army Painter WP1136 Quickshade Washes Dark Tone, thinned 1:1 with airbrush retarder to reduce the darkening effect and increase the working time.
After the shade was dry I dryrbushed the grey areas with Vallejo 70.990 Model Color Light Grey. I also brought this up onto the shoes a bit to create the "dirty" effect I mentioned earlier. The girders were similarly dryrbushed with a bit of Gunmetal, giving them a bit of shine back. The pipe got a touch up with a dryrbush of copper, which mainly served to recover some raised areas like edges and bolts from the verdigris. Finally the brown areas were dryrbushed with Green Stuff World Acrylic Color Quicksand Brown. I took a few photos at this stage.
With the painting finally done, I used an airbrush to apply a gloss varnish using a 1:1-ish mix of Mr. Hobby Mr. Color UV Cut GX-112 Gloss and Mr. Hobby Mr. Color Levelling Thinner. During this process I noticed I had dryrbrushed a ton of light grey onto a spot on the fire hydrant, on the back of the model. I considered leaving it but ultimately decided to fix it using mixes of GSW 1831 Acrylic Color Choco Brown, Vallejo 72.011 Game Color Gory Red, and Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black. Also while doing that I somehow took some paint off the rock next to it, so I had to repaint that. Sigh. I re-applied gloss varnish onto the repainted areas with a brush, then added a bit more to some vulnerable areas of the base just for the hell of it.
I finally airbrushed a coat of Mr. Hobby Mr. Color UV Cut GX-113 Flat. I think I screwed something up at this stage, because the varnish ended up a tiny bit "hairy". You can kinda feel it, and it's a tiny bit visible if you look really closely, but after all I had been through on this model I wasn't going to try to fix it.
What I was going to do however, was to figure out a way for my friend to transport the statue safely. I mean, sure, a box full of bubble wrap would probably be fine, but why do things the easy way when you can spend a ton of time and effort making things harder for yourself, right? So I came up with an idea for making custom foam lining for a storage/transport box.
With the varnish all dry he was ready to be removed from his handle-jar. I used a heat gun and scraper to soften the hot glue and remove the jar lid from the bottom of this base, then scraped and sanded off the remaining residue - only doing a
little bit of damage to the visible sides of the base! I found an appropriately-sized box, and measured the inside volume. I then found a source of 2cm (actually more like 19mm) thick foam. With the measurements done, I could start. I imported the original model into Blender.
I then added two stacks of 19mm-thick rectangles, each half the size of the box's internal area. I actually made the rectangles slightly larger and overlapped them, as I figured this could avoid any issues from minor differences in the thickness of the foam, and allow me to trim the final blocks to size.
With everything sized and positioned as needed, I then used boolen operations to "cut" the model out of the rectangles. This effectively gave me a 3D approximation of the ideal foam blocks.
I set the viewport background to white and the rendering mode to wireframe.
Then I set up an orthographic camera looking down on the rectangles from above. I took screenshots of the rectangular blocks from above, two at a time.
I cropped the resulting images, added numbering to keep things clear (F for Front and R for Rear), and printed all the images out out at the correct size.
I cut out the rectangles, then cut out the space needed for the statue to sit, bearing in mind the concept of "drafting angles" and making sure to take off just a tiny bit extra.
It was a job, but finally I had 24 templates I could use to cut the foam.
I pinned the templates to slightly-oversized foam blocks I had cut out earlier using tailor pins so I wouldn't have to deal with any sort of adhesives.
Using my hot wire foam cutting table, I cut the foam to the templates. I quickly learned that leaving more extra foam made it easier to get clean cuts. I made sure to copy each templates' number to the foam.
After a great deal of slow careful cutting, I was ready to glue the layers together. I used PVA to glue the foam together, using up a lot more than I had expected. It didn't help that I occasionally made mistakes and had to wash the glue out of the foam, but the nice thing about PVA and foam is that you can actually do that. As expected a final bit of trimming was needed - which is why I made the templates slightly oversized to begin with - but the result was a nice tight fit. Actually a little too tight, but that's probably better than it being a bit too loose right?
And yeah, by some miracle it all worked and he fit quite snugly. I was kinda surprised actually, I was afraid I might have been a bit too generous and the fit might end up too loose, so I'm very glad that wasn't the case.
When I started working on this big green dummy I had no idea how often I was going to find myself trying something I wasn't sure I could pull off. I learned a lot and I'm happy with him overall, and
very happy with some specific details, but there's some problems that I just gave up on fixing in the end. I know in my head that's fine, but in truth my perfectionist side does still feel a touch of regret that I couldn't quite get everything just right.
After all that time spent handling that big awkwards statue, I feel far more appreciation for how simple and fun it can be to paint a basic 35mm gaming model. I'm actually eager to dive back into my backlog of Warmachine and Monsterpocalypse models and start knocking out some colourful pieces I can push around the table. I think it's going to be a while before I can bring myself to work on something larger, and for the time being at least I am done painting models for people as gifts.
