As soon as I saw the Black Dragon I knew I had to paint one. This figure is one of the best I have seen from Games Workshop. It is sculpted with an astonishing amount of detail and a great deal of extra parts to add a lot of variation to it. Variation which I intended to exploit to its fullest.

Cleaning and Assembly: The Black Dragon consists of some 82 parts of which I nearly used all. Cleaning such a number of small and sometimes delicate parts is never an easy job but the quality of Games Workshop's casts really shows. All parts required minimal effort to clean, it was just the attention to not damage the details which took most of the cleaning time. Many of the parts had to be pre assembled (before painting) in order to not complicate the painting work. Nearly all the black dragon's body had to be assembled except for the tails and wings. The riders bodies however were kept separate in order to easy the painting this time.

Painting: I had many variants in my mind for this Black Dragon and it took me a while to decide on which one to go. After lots of thought I decided to go for a Black and red dragon. I wanted the red to be extremely dark in order for the possible use of this dragon and a carmine dragon which are said to start from red when young and turn to black as they grow old. To obtain these tones I first started with a base coat of light brown which would finally be used as highlights. On top of these came at least 5 airbrush layers of red which was darkened with every layer. Finally there are around 10 to 15 layers of black which was thinned down to blend at its best with the red. The rest was all detailing from the fangs and horns to the two masters and the armour

Assembly: Apart from the Dragon riders much of the assembly had already been done before painting so it was quite an easy process.

Special: For this Dragon I had always in mind to make all the possible versions available. This involved lots of extra work but it was all worthed

I also planned from much before to improve on the base of this dragon. Since Dark Elves are associated a lot with sea, I decided to go for a by the sea base. I wanted to show the dragon taking flight from a stormy shore after it had just killed its last victim a high elf which was done from the spare Dread Lords pieces of the same kit.