Tom Meier's Zombie Dragon and an Undead Lord join the host of the unliving (and a cheeky bonus Nurgle Spawn/Daemon Prince jumps after them)

A few weeks back I discovered a small bookmarks folder named 'RP Wishlist'. Yes I still use bookmarks, I'm old :). Apparently a few years back I decided to buy these models by Ral Partha Europe 'some day'. 'Well,' I thought, 'lets not Aragorn this, and make it this day'. Long story short: a package arrived and these are two of the Ral Partha Europe's models I really wanted to own: Tom Meier's Zombie Dragon (a Citadel classic) and an Undead Lord by Chaz Elliot.(one of the early sculptors at GW, now part of the Die Hard Miniatures team). 

The lichlord and his hound scoured the abandoned keep, searching for fresh recruits to join the undead host...

Getting the models to me, turned out to be a story in itself. After a bit of a wait I got a mail by the ever friendly staff at Ral Partha Europe informing me the delivery van with my package had burned out. Not to worry, no one had been injured and my order had been reshipped. Al it took was an extra bit of a wait. I didn't mind. With a pile of plastic and lead on one side and a new 3D-printer on the other I had plenty of stuff to do. I even got a friendly 'sorry for the wait' discount voucher with my order. Now if only there was an easy way to put ALL the Hearbreaker goblins by Kev Adams in my shopping basket I'd already have used that....(the website at RP is at serious risk of being taken to a museum by a certain mr. I. Jones).

More toys! I still get a nice nostalgic old school kick out of opening an order filled with bagged miniatures.

Anyway here's a greed shot of my order. I duly de-flashed, washed and based the lot and stuck some primer on them. Now lets hope not too many end up on the 'window sill of shame'. For those of you holding a magnifying glass to the picture (or just zooming in). I bought a few Kev Adams Orcs, a couple of Ratmen, a bunch of interesting looking wizards and a couple of Chaos Knights. I decided to start off by painting my undead. I like painting undead. So let's move on the the Undead Lord first, as I already feel a lot of nonsensical prattling warming up when I think about the Zombie Dragon.

I took a bit of a risk assuming by the picture in the store I could make this conversion work. But it paid of (I think).

At first glance I didn't really care for the Undead Lord with Sword model on the RPE website. Did I mention browsing is a bit of a challenge there? When I zoomed in on the picture I decided I liked the rather mysterious face half hidden behind a veil. The only thing that didn't really work for me was the rather hokey looking sword it was named for. I decided to give converting the model a try. On arrival I replaced the sword (it was a loose bit anyway) with the scythe (and hand) of some new-fangled Nurgle model (and the bottom of another Nurgle creature's weapon). On a whim, I mounted the undead lord on a left-over pre-shaped Stormcast base. I think I got away with it and I love the way the Scythe seems to frame the model. Its also gotten seriously (and appropriately) big and domineering. As Pratchett's Death would say: "OH. DRAMA."

Intimidating, big and in control. No I'm not talking about classic Nagash, I'm talking about my new Undead Lord. I'll call him 'The Nameless One' (I'm not very creative with names this morning).

He's big. Here's a shot with two Die Hard Miniatures skeletons, the Zombie Dragon and Classic Nagash for scale. I think he'll make for a seriously imposing wight king in a future game. As to painting, I decided to go for a deep purple (mixed with a bit of grey) on the outer robe. Then I got stuck on the question 'what do I do with the inner robe?' I didn't want to add too much color and couldn't fall back onto a dirty bone color (it would hide the face). In the end I settled on Warpfiend Grey, a greyish purple by GW. I drybrushed both cloak and robe and then used small stripes as an extreme highlight to bring out the contrast. I painted the odd globe in his hand white, adding a white OSL-light effect using a white ink. It didn't look good, so I went back in and brushed Green Fluo (Vallejo) on both the globe and the OSL light effect. That worked (I think). I'm quite satisfied. What a find, awesome model.

Who'd have thought you could re-order a fresh copy of a classic miniature you'd sold off. Now to find an appropriate model to represent the knight on that box...

Let's move on to Tom Meier's Zombie Dragon and the obligatory rambling from my side. Over the years I've actually painted (and dipped) this very model about a dozen times (at least). I still have the original box it was sold in back in the eighties (one doesn't just bin John Blanche paintings). I did sell my original zombie dragon a few years back as it was so out of scale with more modern stuff I didn't see myself paint it. Yes that was stupid. Anyways. This Zombie Dragon miniature has quite a bit of urban legend attached to it. It was originally sculpted and sold by Ral Partha (RP). GW licensed RP dragons at the start of the eighties to bolster its own miniature offerings. GW sold them in boxes with splendid art to sell more models (smart move, I picked it up in the store and couldn't let go way back then). Because of this move, quite a large number of hobbyists (including me) thought Tom Meier's Zombie Dragon was an Oldhammer GW product and very much out of production. The miniature even started selling for silly Oldhammer prices at some point. The joke was on the people paying these prices as RP still casts and sells this model to this day. As the molds are owned by RP you can get the Zombie Dragon for an entirely reasonable price, cast in lead, and it is identical to the one sold in the eighties (minus the box). As of writing this, it cost me five cents short of eleven quid to fix my blunder selling the other model. 

No one will doubt the 'zombie' status of this Dragon. It is an awesome sculpt that still holds up after all these years. 

On to painting. My first attempts (over the decades) always ended up looking badly. The problem (as I see it now) is that you can choose two roads to follow. One is that you try to go for a brownish rotten skin look. This is what Blanche does on the box art. Unfortunately I'm not John Blanche. The trouble I run into is that the red wounds have a hard time contrasting with brown toned skin. It makes a (relatively) smaller model like this hard to read from a distance. Luckily there's another road to follow. On this one you give the dragon a chromatic color (to borrow a term from D&D) like it had in life. You obviously can't pick red or orange as this multiplies the contrasting with blood problem you get with browns. Black is right out for the same reason. The final color I ended up with on my original Zombie Dragon was blue. This mostly works, but I always thought he looked 'too alive for his wounds'. I think I could probably use some tricks I know these days to make that look better (maybe I should order a second one...oh dear this is going to be expensive). 

Size-wise the new Zombie Dragon by GW has the classic one at an advantage.

Long story short: I opted for green as I am a lazy person and green is on the opposite side to red on the color wheel. That means achieving contrast goes into easy mode. I applied a (Vallejo) Goblin Green base color by airbrush (I was painting the skin on a pair of Kev Adams orcs anyway). I mixed the Goblin Green with some (VMC) Dead Flesh, (random) Yellow and White Ink (Liquitex) to paint its belly. Then I went back in with a basic skin color (subtly) airbrushing it around all the wounds. In theory adding a reddish tone on skin implies it is alive. Applying it around wounds tend to make them look more aggravated (in my opinion). Going for a bright red makes wounds look infected and is best reserved for Nurgle's champions. I applied some Coelia Greenshade to the most scaly top bits of the Dragon, varnished it (gloss) and added a enamel streaking grime on top (removing excess with a make-up sponge afterwards). As a last step (after dull coating) I - subtly - added a bit of Tamiya Clear Red around the wounds and based the dragon (with home made texture paint, tufts and sponge). I'm quite happy with the result, and it only took my 25+ years to get there :).

Sorry to veer of course here, but I just had to share these pictures before they went into the 'unpublished pictures folder' like many other models before it.

With that said, I should really finish this post, but I just found two pictures of this model I built and painted at the end of May. I was sitting on the 'dirty side' of my hobby space and wondered what I should do with all the Great Unclean One's bits left over from building that monster. In stead of archiving them in a bits box...I started sticking them together. I added a few spare undead wings, filled the gaps with air-dry clay and had a blast painting it over the course of an evening.

Painting Nurgle to a reasonably looking standard is frighteningly easy. The hard part is restraint (don't overdo the muck) and the most time consuming part only occurs when you think 'let's put stripes on the wing membranes, that'll look cool'. It does look cool though ;)

Its quite amazing what you can achieve with leftover bits, a bit of cheap airdry clay and a spare 60mm round base. No clue what this model will be used for, but I'll think of something. With that I'll leave you all until the next time (most likely another 3D-printing for wargamers blog). Remember: play around with your old bits and try the smaller alternatives to GW (even if their website is a bit shaky). Its all good fun and that's basically what the hobby is about. Now here's to hoping it turns out all the classic Realm of Chaos Champions, Thugs and Beastmen are actually RP sculpts too (they aren't, but fingers crossed :D).