February Kings of Hobby – Ben Stoddard

As February, the month of lovers and presidents (sometimes both at the same time!) comes to a close, I am here to show you a picture of my green dragon…

Ahem! Anyways, for this month’s hobby progress I decided to have some fun after slogging through a horde of archers last month and went for my big baddie on a flying serpent. This guy was huge and could only barely fit on a 75×75 mm base so I decided to count him as a Mystical Dragon Lord, which buck naked costs 340 points, so met the quota for the month.

Here he is in all his glory:

With this model I wanted to try some new techniques that I had always been scared of, in particular using an airbrush. I had to close my eyes and take the plunge on this one in spite of my fears, though and in the end I loved it. Whenever I do a big beastie like this one I’ll be loading up my airbrush from now on because it just made the whole process of gradients and building layers go so much faster. It took a job that would’ve taken me days to do and boiled it down to a single night. In the end I was pretty happy with the results. I only did the green scales on the dragon with it, but it was such a time saver in the end because of it.

Let me know what you think:

I am immensely proud of how this dragon turned out, but I can’t take all the credit. Daniel Read of internet fame deserves a lot of thanks on my part. I had just gone through a fair amount of work on the dragon and was only somewhat pleased with him and where I knew this guy was going to be a centerpiece of my army I really wanted to up my game with him so I reached out to the master painter himself on Facebook to ask for some help. I sent him a picture of what I’d accomplished and he responded “So now what are you going to do?”

I was flabbergasted, I thought I was nearly done and told him so. I can only imagine the sighing and shaking of head on the other side of the chat followed by what was probably an exasperated “oh boy.”

What followed was an intense day of him giving me advice, me following that advice and then taking a picture to send it back to him, followed by more advice, more painting/highlighting, and more pictures being exchanged. It was like have a masterclass session where I was the only one in the class! Dan was impressively patient with me and did an excellent job of instructing me and in the end I would daresay it produced one of the best pieces I’ve ever done and taught me a lot about the importance of highlights in ways that I hadn’t ever thought of!

This model definitely pushed me to a new place as far as my hobby learning was concerned, and I’m looking forward to apply those lessons on my next unit. Speaking of, I’ll give you a preview of what it is here. I’m going to be doing a unit of Awoken Guardians next, but because I want to keep up the theme of making these models even harder than they need to be, and I couldn’t find treemen that fit my theme very well, I decided to take a more… customized approach:

Alright, that should do me for this month. Hopefully it was as good for you as it was for me, but honestly I’m a bit selfish that way so I understand if this doesn’t become a habit. But I’ll see you next time, hopefully, where we can talk about tree hugging!