How to Paint Super Dungeon Explore: Super 16 Bit Part 1 (Spawn Points and Dragonlings)

Last week I went through a very basic way of how to paint your Super Dungeon Explore figures. This week (and following weeks) I’ll be showing you how I’ll be painting my SDE figures. It’ll be a bit more complicated, and involves airbrushing, but hopefully I can find a good balance between time taken and quality provided.

First up, in order to make airbrushing easier, I tried to keep colour ranges to a minimum. Kobolds would be purple, stone and heavily armoured models as well as all bases would be grey, while the Dragon/Dragonlings would be red. Chests would be brown (which shares the same brown base coat as the dragonlings), and cloth/bone bits would be a khaki/bone colour. This more or less meant that I could airbrush in 5 basic colours. Heroes would need to be individually painted, but since they’re heroes, a little bit more work is expected.

I started off with the easiest things; chests and spawn points. As you can see I airbrushed everything in bulk. The stone got a basecoat of dark grey, and then a zenithal spray of light grey (and the bases got a dusting of light grey as well to ensure that the shadows in the cracks were preserved).

Similarly, the bone bits were basecoated with an airbrush an earth (khemri brown) colour, and then hit up with a bleach bone highlight at an angle, and with Menoth while highlight (a bright cream) at the zenithal level. I then painted in the eye sockets a dark brown for contrast. You can see that some heroes that had the same colourscheme were also airbrushed at this point of time.

I basecoated the egg clutch crystal purple (iirc equivalent to leviathan purple from GW). I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the egg clutch to look a bit more like a crystal. Unfortunately, big crystals are hard to figure out, and I couldn’t spend too much time on just a spawn point.

Chests were airbrushed brown, then drybrushed a lighter brown, and had their metals painted in with grey, washed down with Badab black and highlighted back up again. Teeth and the like were painted in at this time.

The dragonlings were similarly easy. After the brown basecoat (same colour as the chests), I highlighted up using the airbrush with a mix of reds and orange browns. This was to lend a little bit of ‘reality’ to the models; I think you don’t really see pure reds on animals all that often.

I then painted in their eyes and tails in a similar manner (Bestial Brown -> Orange -> Yellow -> Yellow White -> Menoth White Highlight) to give a little bit of detailing on the minis. Lastly I painted in their claws (Bestial Brown -> An Ocher Colour -> Bleached Bone -> White). I’m pretty happy with how the dragonlings turned out for the time that I took for them, but I’m still undecided on if I should add some more colours to the models. I’ll probably leave that decision for later; there are still a lot more models for me to paint.

Next week: Some of the kobolds!