Dragon Lords

As you can reasonably infer from my lack of posts about it lately, I haven't been doing much painting. Fortunately, I have a game of Uncharted Seas scheduled for Monday, and my opponent has already fully painted the fleet that he just received less than a week ago. That's spurred by lazy procrastinating ass to get busy on at least one of the three fleets I have had for over a year. Since my opponent has a Shroud Mages fleet, I decided to save my Iron Dwarf fleet for later, mainly so that any observers don't think that the game is only about ironclads. That left either my Dragon Lords or my Orc Raiders. Since the Orcs aren't assembled yet, it was an easy choice to go with the Dragon Lords.

I've always known that I wanted to do the Dragon Lords in bright colors, preferably reds given that I rarely work in that part of the color wheel. I also wanted to keep things simple since I only had a couple of days to finish the project if I wanted them ready for the game. Beyond that I really didn't have a plan going into the project. The end result is a bit of a fortuitous accident, but I'm quite pleased with it.

I started with the primer, a standard ruddy brown that I acquired specifically for this project some time ago. I originally thought that I might just primer the model, add a few details, and then give it a wash, but I decided to put a bit more work into it, and am glad I did. I ended up doing a natural wood color for the hulls almost by accident, using a brown that I thought might be a bit more reddish than it turned out to be. I then used a standard red for the sails, and washed it all with a dark brown wash after adding a few details.

The entire project only took three days. Primer was applied Friday morning. Friday evening I did up one frigate to see how it looked, and did a little work on a couple more. The bulk of the painting was done Saturday afternoon and evening, with everything done but the sealing by the time I went to bed. The only thing done on Sunday was to apply the sealer.

The paints I used are as follows:

Primer: Krylon Ruddy Brown
Hull: Vallejo Game Color 42 Parasite Brown
Sails: Vallejo Model Color 947 Red
Ballistae: Citadel Foundation Iyanden Darksun
Cannons: Vallejo Game Color 1 Chaos Black (I think that's what it's called, the bottle I'm using actually has a blank label)
Cabin Windows: Vallejo Model Color 915 Deep Yellow over Citadel Foundation Iyanden Darksun
Wash: Citadel Wash Gryphonne Sepia