Start by making sure you pin all the parts together, or this monster WILL fall apart. Prime it Chocolate Brown, or the darkest brown you can find. Then take Ral Partha Blood Red and thin it to where it's very thin, and paint over the whole model. Then take the same Blood Red just thinned enough to paint smoothly, and paint all but the deepest shadow areas of the scaly parts. Then take your Blood Red and add just a little drop of yellow to lighten it just a little bit. Drybrush the scales using a fair amount of coverage, then add some more yellow to your red and drybrush again, covering less area. Then drybrush with Blood Angels Red / Orange, covering less area. Then lighten the Blood Angels Red with yellow and do smaller highlight drybrushing. Now take some yellow with an almost totally dry brush (really clean the paint out good), and just drybrush along the very tops of the edges of the scales (always remember to thing any paint you are drybrushing with, or it will clump up on you). Now mix yourself a wash of a medium red, make sure you add some matte medium to this so it will hold together, and wash over the entire scale area to bind all the different shades together so that they flow from one shade to another. Now it's time to paint the underbelly. To paint the underbelly, take a medium brown and add just a little red to it so that you come out with a harvest brown / light rust brown. Thins this to where it will paint evenly, and paint the underbelly, leaving the recesses the dark brown colour. Now make a lighter shade of this, and start painting your large highlights. Make an even lighter shade and make the next layer of highlights (always lighten red with yellow and always darken red with brown, never use black). Paint the horns and claws first paint the very tips a pale cream yellow, then start at the base with an almost black red-brown, and draw it up the horn toward the tip, letting it get thinner as it goes toward the tip, covering part of the yeloow cream colour with a very light coating of paint that becomes more transparent the closer it gets to the point. Now take your red wash and give an even wash coat to the horn. From this point you can highlight the horns to the extent that you wish. Remember to always keep the feel of heat to your paint job. The Red Dragon's very essence is flame, you can also use the same method for painting the claws, and if your dragon has a tail spike, to paint the tail spike. I like to paint the teeth a fairly clean off-white to give contrast to the rest of the mouth detail and it also makes them look meaner with all those glowing white teeth showing. Paint the inside of the mouth a very dark red and the tongue start with dark red at the base and work outward toward the tip with ever lighter shades going red shades then orange-red shades then orange shades then yellow-orange then yellow with the very tip such a light yellow it's almost white, this will give a hot effect. I would paint the eyes with what would normally be white a golden yellow colour, and paint the pupil with a glowing red in a cat's-eye pattern. Paint your details to suit you, so that it will be your unique model, then spray it with Krystal Klear, let that dry hard, then brush on dull cote on all the underbelly areas, and drybrush the scales with gloss cote to give them a metallic look. If you get this all right, you will have a dragon that appears to glow with an inner heat, which is the way I picture Red Dragons.
Have fun! If you haven't done a lot of drybrushing and washes, practice on something else first, and when drybrushing, make all your paint strokes go in the same direction so that all your shadows fall the same way and all your highlights appear to be lit from the same direction.
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