I'm looking for advice.
I have a number of miniatures of lizards and/or dinosaurs. Many of them can become very passable dragons with the simple addition of dragon wings. But dragon wings are not a readily available commodity and it is somewhat labor intensive and expensive to make them out of green stuff or other epoxy putties. Bat wings are an obvious substitute that work pretty dang well I think, but they have their limitations too, most notably the lack of easily available bat minis for cutting off wings.
I am planning on buying all the bat miniatures I can get my hands on during Halloween, but even then I suspect I'll want to do some wings that aren't necessarily bat wings.
What do other people do to make dragon wings, especially if they are converting lizard or dinosaur minis to make dragons?
Last night, just for kicks, I hand-cut a pair of dragon wings from some thin (2mm thick) rubber foam sheets and used some glue to make some "wing bones" on the underside of the foam, then glued it onto a cheap lizard mini and painted them both green. It came out fairly passable, especially considering the ridiculously low price for the mini and the foam sheet (I got a huge pack of such sheets at the dollar store for, well, a dollar.)
Any suggestions or comments about making dragon wings would be appreciated.
I go through bits boxes at cons for wings, and have a collection of about 20 pairs to spare.
Reaper's site also sells pairs of wings, just do a search for "wing" and you'll see the Dragonman Conversion Kit, Demonic Wings, Angel Wings, and (including their "boneyard" category of "pieces of multipart minis) many wings from winged monsters.
I have two types of dragon wings from my Mage Knight minis, and I made a silicon mold of each of them and have made some copies of thw, but they are highly stylized and since I have already made several dragons using them, I have grown tired of them and want something new. I've considered doing the same for Reaper wings.
I guess my main problem is that I have two diametrically opposed goals for my dragon wings. First I want them to be dirt cheap. Second I want them to be highly detailed and as unique as possible.
As I was doing my daily walk at lunch today I was musing about how to utilize the foam sheets. I got the idea of making sets of dragon bones and muscles out of sculpey clay, and then gluing the foam to the bones/muscles. That would allow me to make a bunch of unique wings of different sizes and styles fairly cheaply.
The problem with that approach is that the foam has a very flat and boring texture, so I would still need a way to create different textures. I've considered putting tiny pebbles (I mean REALLY tiny pebbles) into my base paint to create a random knobby texture, or using some sort of "pen" which lays down a paste or putty as you draw with it, but I've never actually seen anything that does that.
As usual I am trying to do something difficult and artsy for as close to "free" as I can manage.
I'm looking for advice.
I have a number of miniatures of lizards and/or dinosaurs. Many of them can become very passable dragons with the simple addition of dragon wings. But dragon wings are not a readily available commodity and it is somewhat labor intensive and expensive to make them out of green stuff or other epoxy putties. Bat wings are an obvious substitute that work pretty dang well I think, but they have their limitations too, most notably the lack of easily available bat minis for cutting off wings.
You could look at your local dollar store's toys section for cheap donor models. I was once in a similar situation and ended-up buying a bag of cheap dinosaurs (it had two pterodactyls). The kids were happy to share the other four dinos.
Also as SKR mentioned above, check your FLGS for Warhammer (or else) bit box(es). My game store always have something interesting in there, although not always what I'm looking for that visit, but it's worth chancing a look.
'findel
Heh, I visit the local dollar stores so much they probably recognize me on sight by now... I found some really great dinosaurs at the local dollar store, a T-Rex, a stegasaurus and a triceratops, all more or less the right scale for Pathfinder, meaning they are huge "miniatures." I bought three of each. The foam sheets I'm talking about were from the dollar store as well as some bags of critters. I think I may have bought the one with the pteranodons because I had two of them before cutting their wings off and gluing them on a lizard and a dinosaur to make "dragons." I think some of my lizards also came from the dollar store.
Besides the dollar stores I spend a lot of time roaming around in Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Target, Walmart, US Toy, Toys 'r us and just about any other place that sells cheap stuff.
I like the idea of using textured paper. I could paint the paper with Minwax varnish/stain and make it more like plastic than paper, and hopefully that would be durable enough for my purposes. I will try that out.