Capturing dragons

A while back I collected a bunch of W1ndstone peacock (which is to say, purple with blue, green and gold) dragons -- they're "shelf things"; which is to say, what G and I call pretty things whose only purpose is to be decorative, that you put on a shelf and admire, and of which there are an endless quantity. The dragons, when sitting, are about the size of both of my hands next to one another, and are in various poses. W1ndstone (you can visit their www.windstoneeditions web site) comes up with new colors every so often, always vibrant and beautiful, and also retires a particular statue line every so often. Unfortunately they've continued to produce the peacock ones for many years, which hasn't exactly done anything to the value of my own informal collection, but fortunately that doesn't make them any less handsome.

Now apparently artist M. Pena and her cohorts were cleaning out some stuff in storage, and found some prototypes -- for example, a handful of white flapcats (winged cat statues) that didn't sell well when they tested it in the stores; they only ended up putting the black tuxedo and the siamese cat pattern into mass production. Of interest to me was that there was apparently an older version of the "Old Warrior" (not sure if that would make it "Older Warrior" :-) ) dragon model that looked more scarred than the version that they ended up mass-producing. Therefore stashed in their warehouses was apparently a large number of these, which they used to test out new color patterns. For example (if I'm interpreting their description correctly), they painted a bunch black with a sort of a peacockish gold edging, a pattern that was so popular that they mass-produced all of the other dragons (with the updated Old Warrior) with that coloring. They're also selling some in Emerald (the updated Old Warrior is not currently sold in Emerald, for whatever reason), and the artist also test-painted 10 peacocks a green/blue combination (no purple). It's apparently possible that they may choose to produce the entire line in green/blue if they like the way it looks.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that they're selling these prototypes off on Ebay; the blue/greens and the black/gold have been personally painted by M Pena herself, and all of the prototypes are signed, numbered, and come with a certificate of authenticity. :-) As you can probably guess, all this got my attention, and I decided I wanted one. I was tempted by the black/gold (I'm not surprised it was mass-produced, it's lovely), but ended up managing to nab one of the ten green/blue, woooooo! :-) Along the way, I also decided to buy an unrelated pair of dragons from an earlier line from a different seller, a sort of light/dark avocado green, at what would have been more or less the purchase price off the shelf twenty years ago. Sounds like an ugly color, I know, but...when you admire the *form* of the dragon so much (and now make some killer guacamole, thanks E!), it's all good. :-) And hey, at least it's a color that has been discontinued.

I've been considering what to do with my peacocks...perhaps box them for a while, to appreciate them all the more later when I dig them up again. And maybe they'll have stopped producing the darn things by then, who knows. ;-)

But I'll have my green/blue -- I do enjoy having nifty things that come with a good story. I also had occasion to exchange cheerful emails with Ms. Pena herself on a related thread which I won't bother to go into here, so I can call that a sort of brush with fame, hah. ;-)