Rackham Cynwall Dragon ++PICS++

Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:

No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.

If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

**ZandrisIV**

Well, so I found this Dragon that's been hanging around inside one of the boxes in my room for nearly a year now, primed and undercoated but never painted for lack of desire. Recently, desire grabbed me in the form of 28mm Samurai, and to raise funds for the project, I decided to slap some paint on this dragon and eBay it away…

The painting was the easy part. Wash, drybrush, drybrush, drybrush, Rackham sculptors have filled the model with so much detail. So much detail until you could even mistake all the casting sinkholes as just more surface detail. Well, I painted the main body and the wings seperately, thinking to join them together when done…

Time taken for painting ~ 5 hours
Time taken to fix two wings onto main body ~ 5 hours

Why, you may ask? The problem with these Rackham sculptors is that they don't give a thought about how their incredibly beautiful sculpts are supposed to be assembled. The join between the exceedingly heavy wings and body has such a small surface area that glue just wouldn't hold. Even worse, most of the join area is wing membrane, that is too thin to take extra pins (I'd already put one into the shoulder).

So I struggled with the damned thing for a couple of hours, then throw my arms up and buy some two-part epoxy. The epoxy works, for one wing… The other wing attaches, but keeps drooping because the epoxy has a slight flex to it. Another hour or so of slapping more epoxy on reveals that unlike firepower, more glue doesn't necessarily solve the problem. So I rip everything out, and do it the hard way, with epoxy AND some Mr. Strong two-part putty.

Today I varnished and photographed the dragon. It looks pretty good once done, but the amount of anger I put in it is immense…

Anyway, on to the pics…

As with many of my paint-ups, it's for sale, go and have a look!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250088764300

And a Coolminiornot link: coolminiornot.com/150617

Comments and criticisms welcomed!

**Dice Monkey**

I like the subdued tones you used. The base is kinda bleah though.

**ZandrisIV**

Yeah, I'm not terribly happy with the base either. The dragon's tail itself does not open the model to very creative basing. The whole tail area is small, narrow, and consists of two parts, making weird basing a real pain. Furthermore, the instability of the whole model means that the dragon itself should not be raised too far off the base, or else it'll tip even easier than it does now.

I suppose the best base I've seen so far for this dragon would be a rock, with the tail coiled around it... mmm.

**Orlanth**

As far as the miniature is concerned. I like the dragon very much except the head.

Nice paintjob though, I would have chosen different colours to go with red. The white tones look a bit tyranidy. Saying that with a bit of conversion work that would make an awesome flyrant.

**Waaagh_Gonads**

A friend here in Oz bought the same model and described very similar problems - fantastic sculpt for detail but a bugger to assemble.

Also ho do you find the odd position the wing is sculpted into (bent over to almost 90 degrees)?

**Hordini**

That is actually my favorite dragon model at this point, and has been since it was released, despite it's problems. I am sad to hear that the wings are so difficult to pin. If I was going to build a model like that I would definitely be weighting the base as much as possible. Perhaps a large round base would make basing a bit easier?

Your paint job is very nice. I dig it.

**razormage**

I actually had little difficulty in pinning the wings: a single thick pin into the shoulder join on either side, and then two or three 26 gauge pins into the membrane. If you go slowly enough with a small bit, your patience is rewarded and it's quite stable. Once it was glued and dried, I applied greenstuff to the gap for a bit more strength and to take away a bit of the gaps underneath.
And I agree - this was probably the easiest model I've ever painted. There is just an insane amount of detail built into this sculpt. Enough to make me give serious consideration to their titan dragon...
As for the base, I've had balance problems as well. Right now it's on a 50mm, but I think it's going to end up rebased on something custom sculpted to support it and add a LOT of weight underneath. I'm leaning towards pinning the tail in about four or five places and then drilling through something with some 1" or 2" long wires. But, for the moment, those just remain plans, and I've not started anything with it yet.

**ZandrisIV**

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Right now, I've stuffed the base with as much metal as I can find, 8x 1p coins to be exact, and it is still very dubious in terms of stability. I suppose if you could find a rock the right shape, then you could wrap the tail around it, and then weight it with even more metal around the base.

@Orlanth

Now that you mention it, it does *look* very tyranidy... Even the back-plates look like the extended carapace bits on the Monstrous Creatures sprue...

@Gonads

The wing is bent around a bit much, partly due to gluing issues, AGAIN, and partly due to the fact that I didn't find it sufficiently peculiar to warrant fixing. It does give a very dynamic "bird in flight" kind of look, and if you really study the mini, the wing anatomy is thoroughly screwy anyway.

@razormage

My problem with the base doesn't come so much from getting it mounted on a base, there's enough surface area down there to get it glued down nice and tight, it's more of how the tail was sculpted, making it quite weird to position naturally.

I knew there had to be an easier way of pinning it, but I run with a 1mm drill bit and paperclips only, so I think that's part of my problem. Surface area available for joining the wings is also an issue, and I really dislike the idea of having to apply putty to a miniature after it's painted, mainly due to difficulties in replicating the paintjob in the puttied area. As it stands, the shoulder area looks slightly different from the rest of the mini, but it does add some variation to it and is probably a good thing.

**ZandrisIV**

*BUMP*

Auction Ends tonight at 8pm GMT