30MF 1/12 Dragonia Knight
Another 30 Minutes Fantasy kit! These have been super hard to buy recently, so the last one I was able to build was the Rosan Knight 3 months ago. The Dragonia Knight is a super new release, but I was luckily able to snag one at a local store right before they ran out of stock in December, and now it's finally built!
The Dragonia Knight represents a third faction in 30MF's storyline. Whereas the Rosan are the "dark" faction and the liber are the "hero" faction, the new Dragonia faction are a group of draconic lizard people with no clear faction alignment as of yet.
Just like the 30MF Rosan Knight, this kit is divided into three main colour groups - the really nice red armour, a sort of coppery brown, and a lighter purply grey, as well as a few pure grey sections for the waist-skirt, wing, and weapon.
I decided to go with a warmer colour pallete for weathering this kit, using a gold/brass drybrush to lightly weather the red armor panels, giving a nice subltle worn look, and layering a bronze and gold for the lighter greys over the legs and arms, and using the bronze with a little silver pigment powder to tackle the darker brown sections. I hit the grey parts with my usual metallic combo of gunmetal and silver, but I used a sand colour on the skirt-piece instead to make it look like worn fabric rather than metal. With panel lining, I kept it simple, with a black enamel liner over most of the kit, and a brown Gundam Marker for the red armour and sand-coloured accent parts, which helps the lining feel a little more subtle.
Again, as with the Rosan Knight, you initially build a base "sillhouette" form, before adding the armour parts that flesh it out. The sillhouette for this kit was genuinely pretty cool by itself, forming a simple lizardman form, but I always intended to leave the kit in its full armoured mode, which swaps out the front of the jaw and one of the shoulder parts to add armour detail. The armour parts attach prretty securely, and you omit some of the armour for the right arm, giving it a sort of Murmillo or Thracian Gladiator look.
The Dragonia Knight has excellent articulation and is super fun to pose. It has a set of digitigrade legs, with a poseable dewclaw and very solid ankle rotation, and a fully poseable segmented tail, as well as a jaw that can open and close. The ab crunch is pretty impressive, however due to the design of the head, the neck can pretty much only look down, left, and right. You can pose the wing in the back by rotating it upwards, but it's a little bit of an accent gimmick rather than a proper poseable wing.
The kit includes a host of hand options, with the same somewhat frustrating connector as the Rosan Knight. There's two open hands, two closed fists, and two open fist options. There's also two full sword options included in the kit. There's a shorter wide-bladed falchion, and a longsword that somewhat resembles an xacto knife (or maybe a very straight katana?). You can attach one or both to 3mm ports on the back of the kit, or pose it with both weapons simultaneously.
I had a lot of fun building this kit, and it was great to get my old Rosan Knight out to pose the two models together.
I definitely reccomend picking up a Dragonia Knight if you get the chance. There's a super cool assymetric aspect to its design, and it looks great posed on the shelf. I really hope I'm able to get the Rosan or Liber Archer kit at some point in the future, because I feel like it'll fit right in in my 30MF collection.
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