Finally, a real dragon! Meet Glazhael, the Cloudchaser – A mature White Dragon living in the ice caves beneath Skyreach Castle. I used the Reaper Bones Silver Dragon from the 2nd Kickstarter as his miniature.

You may wonder why I did not use the miniatures that are supposed to be white dragons from Reaper. They have Deathsleet, a perfect figure for a D&D white dragon (fin on head). Well, easy. I just didn’t have that miniature and I wanted to make use of the Silver Dragon. In D&D Silver Dragons just don’t look that the Reaper dragon. However, the miniature looks very much like a Pathfinder White Dragon. I supposed it would look great as a white. And apparently, it did and Reaper also thought so. They feature my painted version as example in their Online Store!

Glazhael is the dragon on the cover of the adventure module. The picture above shows Rezmir bringing him some treasure. Yet, the cover picture inspired me to paint the miniature not in cold white/blue colors, but to use purple.

Preparation

First, I wanted to use a new base for the dragon. I recently ordered a couple of different resin bases from a german manufacturer, PK-PRO. I imagined, the rocks could easily be painted as ice.

Basing and Priming

After priming black, I dusted the dragon with white primer to achieve basic shading, as always. The dragon already looks epic!

Painting

Fist, I painted the base. I basecoated everything in Vallejo Model Color Foundation White. I wanted the snowy-icy base to have another white color than the dragon. To make it look like ice, I washed the base several times with a dark blue wash and later with a sky blue wash.

Painting the dragon was remarkably easy and did not involve any fancy painting techniques at all. The shading was already pretty nice after airbrushing, so I started to drybrush the scales white Vallejo Model Color Offwhite. I wanted a nice, cold white there. The same thing was done with the belly scales.

Then, I mixed a glaze of very thin purple and applied it to the belly scales and some of the deeper recesses of the figure. I then re-highlighted the edges with a white drybrush. Next, I created a blue glaze and mixed both glazes right on the wings of the dragon, leaving enough of the black primer shining through.

For better contrast, I painted the the horns and claws black – just like in most pictures of the Pathfinder White Dragons. To make the dragon really look evil, I painted the eye sockets in black and gave him a black scar at the snout. The tongue was painted in dark blue. Finally, I painted the eyes with VMC Sky Blue.

And that’s all. Please enjoy my version of the Reaper Silver Dragon as Glazhael, the Cloudchaser! The miniature is also featured in a thread over at the Reaper Boards.

You can see the miniature in action in the final battle for Castle Skyreach: