In Cold Blood

My eldest son - and the youngest, to be fair - is obsessed with dinosaurs. Every since I fixed up that old carnosaur he's spent ages in the kitchen looking at it and trying to get hold of it. The same happened with the dragon.

About two years ago he caught sight of the new plastic GW Carnosaur and immediately called it a dragon. Every so often he mentions the 'big dragon' again. Last week I needed a wash and popped to the new Warhammer shop that's opened in town, eldest in tow.

I didn't get the wash because he kept dragging me away from the paint stand going ""Daddy look at this... it's sooooooo cool." The thing he liked the most? The carnosaur. Obviously.

I'm a weak man.

A quick.bit of googling proved that eBay prices for the new carnosaur are not low and that for the price of a new carnosaur you could buy one of the Start Collecting boxes which includes a shedload of figures.

So...

Honestly, he wasn't this excited at Christmas.

First thing was to sort out the colour scheme; the Eldest suggested that he wanted his Carnosaur to be blue, so I had to find a way to do the lizards in a colour that would strongly contrast with that.

Inspiration in hand I cracked on. The basic technique was the same I used on my new bloodbowl teams and the Great Goblin; zenithal prime followed by inks, transparent paints and glazes.

This had the advantage of creating very vibrant colours which is what I wanted for these High Fantasy models - very different to the Low Fantasy middle earth palette I've been using a lot recently.

Trim and details was done picking up on the meso-American feel; lots of gold and turquoise with bright yellow/orange feathers.

Overall I'm very happy with these but I'm going to try a couple more with some different skin tones for the Lizardmen- purple and orange, I think.

The eldest is very happy with them.