Fire Wings w/ mounted Beelphegor Part 10

Assembly continued...

So up until this point I haven't made any mention of what color I am planning to paint the dragon. I realize that the kit is called Fire Wings, however I believe that the title of my piece would be better suited as Ice Wings. That is correct, I will be painting a blue dragon...

Why is this important, well this post outlines the modifications that I am making to the base and they wouldn't really make much sense without divulging that little tidbit of information.

Let's make some icicles.

The photo below shows some pins cut to various lengths and pinned through a piece of balsa wood. The wood is there to provide me a way to work on several of these at once with the added benefit of providing a flat top surface to the icicles themselves.

Now comes the fun part, making the icicles themselves. The following pic shows the final product of two passes using Golden Regular Gel (Matte) medium. The gel was applied liberally with a brush for both coats and shaped accordingly. The gel dried semi clear which doesn't phase me as I intended to paint the icicles from the beginning. If I had desired clear icicles I would have had to use something other than pins for the basis of my forms and a different product such as Woodland Scenics Realistic Water.

All in all I was thrilled with the results especially given the fact that this was my first attempt at making icicles. After allowing the medium to dry fully, I then used a hobby knife to cut around the base of the icicle where it meets the balsa wood. Next came the task of separating the pins from the wood which took a little doing. In hindsight I should have used much thinner balsa wood, but I went with whatever scrap I had laying around at the time.

Finally we have the photo of the base with the icicles attached. In the end I used a total of 5 icicles, but I created many more so that I could choose what worked best in the end. The icicles are all attached via the excess pin that went into the balsa wood.

To be continued...