Trogdor Was A Man– I Mean, He Was a Dragon Man

We’re going to have some fun with this guy. Of all of the new Player Races in the most recent editions of D&D, one of my absolute favorites is the Dragonborn. Ironically, they’re not available in my weekly game, but still. Dragonborn are a lot of fun, and extremely interesting visually. To start, they can be any of the colors of the Chromatic or Metallic dragons of the various D&D settings, so you’ve got a hugely varied palette. Red, black, green, white, blue, copper, brass, bronze, gold and silver, and all of the various shades of those basic colors provide excellent bases to build from. You can even play with actual metallic paint if you want, although I chose to go with a non-metallic for contrast.

Like most of the Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures line, the Dragonborn Fighter is a two-pack, and one of the reasons I like the line as much as I do. These two can be utilized as different PCs, or the same PC at different points of his adventuring career. This is a nice throwback to a series Ral Partha did back in the 90s that offered PC minis at low- mid- and high-level, but I don’t think it was deliberate. Just fun happenstance.

On the whole, these are pretty good out of the pack. There’s some definite flash and mold lines to take care of, most notably around the edge of the cape and on the feet near the base, but nothing an X-Acto can’t handle. There’s a little bit of gunk where the primer didn’t settle evenly into the spaces between the plates, but it can be cleaned out farily easily. This is one of the few reasons I’d like to see WizKids offer an unprimed version, but again, as with almost every mini in this line, it’s five bucks for two minis, so… I can’t really be that upset about needing to do a little cleaning.

Here’s the paints I used for this one:

Also, if you click through and buy anything from the Amazon links I’ve provided, I’ll get a small portion of the sale. It won’t cost you any more than usual, but it will help keep the lights on here at the blog.

I used Charred Brown, Black Primer, and Scrofulous Brown for the basecoats over the grey primer. I could have used black for the greaves and pauldrons, but brown works just as well. I hit the cloak with black to deepen the blue I was going to work with, and the shield because I wanted it to have a bit of a different tone than the armor on his body. We’ll see if it worked on the finished product. I intended for this one to be a Copper Dragonborn, so I used the Scrofulous Brown, since it’s a nice orange-brown base that I thought would turn a nice coppery shade once I hit it with a wash.

I was wrong, but we’ll get to that.

Here you can see where I’ve gotten the armor painted and washed. The scale is Bright Bronze, and the greaves and pauldrons are Gunmetal. I hit both with a wash of Serpahim Sepia and it’s starting to pull together. I used the sepia for two reasons: one is that you generally want to shade golds and bronzes with brown, and the other is that I wanted to shade the steel while also giving it a used but maaaaybe not exactly well-cared-for look. It strikes a nice balance between possibly-oiled, possibly-rusty that I think really adds some character to this model.

The cloak is Imperial Blue, which is a nice dark blue, and offers an excellent contrast to the orange in the Scrofulous Brown, especially with the bits that attach to the front of the figure. That’s a very nice touch that really helps frame the face on this model.

The cloak was easy; just a wash of Army Painter’s Blue Tone and we’re good. I like this one mostly because it’s dark enough to make a difference over the dark blue I started with. I also hit the head, hands, and feet with more of the Seraphim Sepia and what I got was a little more of a deep brown than I expected. This is going to change the direction of where I go with the figure.

And here I’ve started the highlights. I hit the raised folds of the cloak with Imperial Blue, then added a little Magic Blue to it and took it up one more level. For the metal, I did the same; an initial layer of the base, followed by Silver and Glorious Gold on the steel and bronze respectively. I also hit the high points of the hands and head with a layer of Scrofulous Brown and Gold Yellow, meaning my Copper Dragonborn ended up a Gold. But that happens sometimes. You start in one direction and end up another, just like the Rust Monster. Finally some Squid Pink on the tongue and Bonewhite on the teeth round out the head.

The last thing I did was mix Reaper’s Clear Blue with some Vallejo Metal Medium and paint the center of the shield. It’s got enough texture that I left that without a wash, but if you wanted to, you could use Dark Tone or Nuln Oil on it. I may do a post on using the metallic mediums to make your own colored metallics, but I’m still playing with them, myself. Once I have some techniques down that I like, I’ll put them up.

Also, just for fun, I took some Blood for the Blood God and spattered it on the shield and front of the model, and some of Army Painter’s Wet Mud and hit the cloak and feet.

It’s always fun to work with the technicals, although I definitely need to practice, since I got a better spatter pattern on my painting handle than I did my figure, which I’m kinda mad about, not gonna lie.

I do like how the mud looks on the figure, though. It dries to an interesting texture that isn’t glossy, but looks like a nice mud spatter.

At this point, he’s pretty much done. I put him on the round base he came with and hit it up with some Agrellan Earth and another Sepia wash. Overall, I really like this model. He’s a lot of fun to paint, and there’s a lot to work with here. Even though I went with similar tones for the armor and skin, there’s enough texture and depth to the figure to provide contrast, along with the strategic placement of a color on the opposite side of the color wheel. He’s another example of a simple paint job that does the job. We didn’t kill ourselves putting insane amounts of detail on him, and we didn’t have to make every color stand out from every other color. He’s an Okay mini. but that’s fine! Put him on a table with some terrain, and he looks great!