Lizard Dragon

In this piece, my main focus was trying to capture the movement. I like it, I think it's decent. Maybe as the sculptor I'm biased, but it feels like the images don't do justice to the movement it captures. The idea was to have this creature coming down this very steep mountain terrain in a hunting or aggressive manner.

An interesting point sculpting this is that, because of its respectable height, it didn't fit in my oven in one piece. Gladly, the spot where I had to split it into two pieces is almost invisible.

Beyond the sculpt itself, this piece was a major turning point for my painting process. My main reference for painting is YouTube miniature painting tutorials. There are similarities and differences. In general, this isn't canvas, and the figures I make are pretty small, so I think it's a decent reference. With that said, a major difference is the size. Most miniatures use a 28mm base, so the height would be no more than a couple of centimeters. My figures, on the other hand, are in the order of magnitude of 20 cm for a full figure.

Miniature painting's primary paint material is acrylic paints—they are water-based and dry very quickly. But for my "big" figures, it's a problem. I had a hard time using those techniques on such a large scale. Basically, the "feature" or "pro" of acrylics in the miniature world becomes a disadvantage for me when I try to use it at my scale. I'm not arguing that one is better, just that the techniques I tried didn't work out for my use case. Furthermore—and not to take away from the fact that I'm not that technical with a brush yet—the "fix time" before the paint dries is just very short.

Then I have oil painting. Unlike acrylics, they dry much slower and thus are more forgiving to mistakes. You can fix a mistake hours after paint has been put in the wrong place, and blending is much more natural for me, as opposed to the common practice of layering in acrylics (thinly overlaying paints to create a blend).

This was the first sculpture where I tried oil painting, and I loved it. I succeeded in making icy thorns as well as a blazing hot stomach, and got beautiful colors I could control, blend, and fix over the hours of work it took me to create the sculpture.