Sirrob01

I’ve been working on putting together a Elven Alliance Army using Onemonks Elven Alliance paper miniatures/standees. I always liked the Dragon rider from the old warmaster High elven army and no elven army is complete without a dragon rider. So I drew a dragon and then combined one of Onemonks existing elves with my dragon, it turned out pretty good and it’s the first standee were it almost turned out as I visualized it in my head .

First up was to draw a dragon, I looked at the old warmaster mini and used that as the base for my drawing. I did change a few things like the front leg being way up in the air. After redrawing a resizing the drawing a few times I ended up with the below:

It wont win any prizes or drawing contests but it provided me with a base to use to start drawing in Inkscape. I began tracing the above in Inkscape and made a few changes as I was tracing the drawing in: thickened the body, made the wings flatter as I planned to do a 2.5D model rather than flat, Redraw/modified the legs and feet, actually drew a hand. I’m not sure why but I can draw passable hands/claws in Inkscape but on a piece of paper no luck. I coloured the dragon as far as I could in Inkscpae but due to all the complex curves etc I could not colour as far in inkscape as I normally do. I was very careful with the colouring this time and used high contrast shades as I was pretty disappointed with the Chimera shading. Below is the final export from Inkscape, you can see all the parts that were assembled later in Gimp. I also did a test build at this point just to check everything worked as expected:

After importing the exported file to Gimp I broke each component onto it’s own layer and then begin the task of colouring and finalizing the pieces. First up was the body shading which was done by doing an ever shrinking mask of colours for the body and flood filling these masks with lighter shades of blue. Once all the layers were coloured I blurred them all and then combined. This step was extremely fiddlly as I had to find a compromise between to light and to dark. Next up was the reverse side of the wings which compared to the above was a very easy; apply drop shadow each layer and assemble the layers in order. This bought the dragon step to completion:

Now I needed to add the rider. First up I rechecked the sizing of the dragon compared to rider and checked that on my craftrobo cut template. I had a little bit of space and as the dragon was looking a little puny next to the rider I scaled him up by 10%. Next was to assemble a rider, using all three of One monks Castailian Knights I manged to assemble a complete (very close) Knight with no weapon. Next I grabbed a pike from the elf pikeman set and shortened it’s handle and lengthened the shaft a little, I also added a larger hand protecting cone similar to what you see on jousting sticks. Lastly I grabbed a shield from the elf Javeliners as it seemed more appropriate for a Dragon Rider. After fiddling around with the above parts and using the most minimalistic additions so that edits are hopefully not obvious I ended up with a workable Dragonrider.

Adding the Rider to the back of the dragon was simply a matter of sorting the layers in the correct order and erasing parts or pieces of parts that couldn’t be seen. Lastly I layed the Rider out onto a page and created the Craftrobo GSD cutting file. As it turned out I had scaled the dragon up a hair to much so The elfs head just pokes out of the cutting area but it’s an easy 2cm curve to cut by hand. Final print/assembly/Test cut and I ended up with the below:

Pretty Happy with how it turned out, I would recommend using at a minimum the 50mm pill shaped base, better is a 40/50mm square either way glue the dragon into the base permanently. You’ll definitely need to add some weight to the base to make it 100% stable, ie magnetic bases or cut your own from magnetic sheet . I will release the Dragon as a separate standalone mini later, I need to figure out an easy re-colour method (a post/project for another day). A big thanks go’s to Onemonk for allowing people to use and mod his existing models. The GSD and PDF are below, As usual if you save the GSD rename it to .gsd rather than .odt:

Elven Alliance Dragon Rider – PDF

Dragon Rider – GSD

I hope some other people get some fun out of this standee.