Daniel’s Dragon - The Beginnings
The Model
The crafting of the dragon began with a Christmas present. This Christmas present was a voucher that could be traded in for one paper mache dragon. The artist-parent-mother-blogcrafter was likely expecting that I would ask for a dragon a few inches long. Obviously, she assumed wrongly. As soon as I received this voucher, I grabbed a tape measure and went to measure the length of my room, an idea forming rapidly in my mind. The room measured 12 feet long and 10 feet wide so I grabbed the Draconomicon and found the length of the dragon’s head, neck, torso, tail, and wings along with its height and width and scaled them to a 7.29 scale so it would fit in the room.
Once I knew the statistics of the base dragon, I had to think of a method for construction. This is where the mother-creature came in handy, as she happened to know a form of paper mache that would have a result of being much sturdier than normal paper mache. This method involved constructing a basic skeleton out of wire, taping down wadded up paper in the appropriate shape, then layering down paper soaked in flour over the top and finally placing a layer of cloth soaked in glue over that to look like scales. Once the cloth is laid down, the dragon is painted blue then has gloss applied to it. Our chief references; Make Something Ugly… for a Change, The Definitive Guide to Papier/Cloth Mache by Seattle author Dan Reeder and Draconomicon: The Book of Dragons by Andy Collins, Skip Williams, and James Wyatt.
Daniel the Dragoncrafter
