Shifting Realms, a game by Soaring Rhino (a team-up between veteran designer Craig Van Ness – the creator of Heroscape and Battleship Galaxies – and his brother Jeff), is in a nutshell a strategy board game heavily inspired by typical RTS video games including worker and warrior units and resource-producing buildings as major mechanics. The plot is basically that the multiverse went all screwy for some reason and the players take control of factions trying to restore order by rebuilding and solving the problems of the various realms.

One such realm, Tyrfing, is populated by dwarves that are terrorized by a huge dragon, which is also the only full miniature in the base game. It’s a good sculpt with a decent amount of detail for its scale, and it’s chunky enough to feel good in your hand when playing. I admit that I was a little disappointed at having only one miniature that can only be played in 20 of the 60 possible board configurations, especially coming straight off Heroscape and Battleship Galaxies with their respective gorgeous sets of minis, but honestly I couldn’t do much better in Soaring Rhino’s position as a startup company funding their untested project through Kickstarter.

Between other larger projects, I decided I wanted to get some paint onto that dragon, but I figured that every game has a giant red dragon, so why not do something different for fun? I asked on Twitter what color to paint it and got a response from Craig Van Ness himself (or at least Soaring Rhino’s social media person who is presumably Craig-Van-Ness-adjacent) suggesting green!

So like anyone who gets a specific direction from a creative personal hero I got started. In total the project took about 5 1/2 hours from start to finish, and because I underestimated the time it would take I did it all in one sitting that happened to be on one of my Selfish Streams (back when I was doing that on the regular last year).

I used the Vallejo Game Color line of paints and my at-the-time best brush, the Reaper #2 sable round that I bought earlier that same day; see my toolkit deep-dive pages for more details as always. For the most part my paints were thinned 2:1 with the usual thinning mix.

For this mini, I took a different approach than my usual work and spent considerable extra time on the initial basecoat. I wet-blended Sick Green, Jade Green, Turquoise, and Ultramarine Blue in a smooth gradient from bottom to top of the dragon’s torso, then used Turquoise and Ultramarine on the wing musculature. After that, the claws, teeth, and horns got Bonewhite before I hit the backs of the wings’ skin with the same Turquoise-through-Sick Green gradient to give it a tone close to the torso’s scales.

The bottoms of the wings got a blend of Royal Purple and Hexed Lichen for a striking, bold purple that would presumably appear when in flight or when otherwise intimidating prey, somewhat like butterfly or moth wings’ stunning patterns. The inside of the mouth got Scarlet Red with a bit of Warlord Purple for the soft palate, and then after nearly four full consecutive hours of work the basecoat was finally complete.

From there, the next thing to do was give most of the body a wash of Black Wash diluted with thinner to 50%, which brought out a lot more of the texture of the piece. After that dried, and a few more touch-ups, the last steps were to add a drybrush of diluted Silver over the scales, taking care to brush softly to avoid tinting the gradient too badly, and applying Hot Orange and Bloody Red for a glowing-eyes effect. A bit of Black Ink on the base and a thorough spray of Dullcote later and the project was complete!

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Shifting Realms’ first expansion, Darkness Revealed, just completed its Kickstarter campaign and will be published soon!