A thing a week 2026, week 26

This week we continue our tour of the biggies which will clear out most of them. I also get to re-live the trauma of "I was lazy and glued everything together without thinking about how I'm going to paint them." So we got that to look forward to. 

First up we get both! The blue guy on the left is a Greater Basilisk and he turned out really sharp. This is a high drama, low effort offering and I specifically picked an undercoat that was a little bit glossy. In this case, it works! He's mostly drybrushed with increasingly high valued paints, in this case Golden So Flat Ultramarine. The guy on the right is a Celestial Stag and even though he took way longer, the result is so much less good. Horns in particular eat a lot of time and the total effect is kind of patchy because of the many layers of drybrush I did to pop out the very shallow texture and still do anything with the volumes. More work could have sold it more but I wasn't in that headspace when I painted it.

Next up we have a coupla really big dragons. The blue guy on the left is an Amber Dragon which I couldn't be bothered to look up before I painted him. He's the same color scheme as our basilisk on purpose so I could go a tiny bit faster. This is a great sculpt with a lot of very nice texture so I spent a lot of time dry brushing and washing over it which landed in a nice place. I would have liked his cyan bits to be a tad lighter but he came out well anyway. Probably the base needed more work but when I got there, I was just plain done. The guy on the right is Narthalyssk and despite having as much texture and effort, came out so much less dramatic. Red is hard to highlight and I was afraid of pushing into oranges which I thought would lose contrast with the yellow ventral scales and wing membranes. Joke's on me, though, since I did a lousy job highlighting those too. Under the my very bright painting lights, he looked OK. On the table, his reds look indistinct and his yellows look washed out and dirty. I did like the demon dots, tho. 

2026 finished mini counter: 153