The Citadel Great Spined Dragon

I am usually able to maintain a fairly disciplined approach to my painting projects. For the most part, I finish my projects once I start them- my painting table rarely has unfinished minis sitting around waiting for me to come back to them. If I am trying to tackle something really big, like say my dwarven army, I purposefully break up the project into bite-sized chunks that I intersperse with other projects so that things never get tedious. I have a queue of models that I want to get done, usually planning for whatever the next game is that I plan to play, and it is rare that a new, shiny acquisition gets to jump the queue and get head-of-the-line privileges.

Christmas morning, my family gave me the Citadel Great Spined Dragon by Nick Bibby. The queue was jumped.

I am still having a hard time believing that this is my dragon

I've mentioned before how much I've wanted this model- for years now, among the first things I looked at nearly every morning was my permanent "Spined Dragon" eBay search. Until last week, I had never even seen one in the flesh. I could tell by the pictures of it on the 'net that it was Mr. Bibby's fantasy masterpiece (he has, of course, gone on to considerable fame sculpting real animals, alas). Others have said it countless times before, but the sculpt really has to be examined up close to appreciate just how amazing the musculature and skin textures are rendered.

Wifey was nice enough to donate a few sheets of heavily textured stationery from an old diary to use for the wings. They took a full day's work to cut out, attach, and detail, but I am very happy with their realism.

I debated putting the holes in the wings for a while, but the examples online convinced me they were necessary

Here's how the model looked when I opened the package:

Thanks much, AllHistoric.co.uk

I spent most of Boxing Day (See! We do pay attention!) toothbrushing this beast with a mixture of Pine Sol and oven cleaner to strip off all of the thick black paint and (mostly) the contact adhesive used to attach those canvas wings. Although it was a lot of work, I was very happy to see that all of my wing "skeletons" were intact. In fact, there was virtually no repair work that needed to be done short of some mould line removal and minor filing to get the head to attach properly.

Nary a scratch to be found

After much discussion with the family, and lots of online picture perusing, I opted for a green color scheme. As much as I love how Bibby's looks in Heroes for Wargames and the temptation to do an homage was strong, I decided to keep it simple with fairly basic techniques.

Here's a shot for scale to see how huge this fella is. That's the Citadel ogre from the Monster Starter Set for comparison.

Straight up huge

So, we haven't had a lot of time to continue the D&D campaign, but that will be remedied shortly.

I hope that all of your Christmas stockings were filled with leaden surprises as well. Happy New Year's, brethren.