The dragon is now firmly attached to the celing with three strands of fishing line. Once the wings are completed they will be attached using ladders, and the dragon will be complete! I’m already planning the next dragon I make. I’m thinking to base it off this:
We brought the dragon outside to finish painting it. We went through all of our paint, so Mom had to get more blue. After painting it, we used a ladder to hoist it up onto the balcony.
At long last, the skin of the dragon has been completly placed, with the finishing of the neck. Tomorrow morning, we will take the dragon out to the driveway, and start spray-painting it blue. After it is done being painted on each side, I believe we will apply a coat of gloss to make it shiny before using a pulley to lift it into it’s new home. Once it is in there, the wings and other finishing touches like the tongue and ears will be created and applied.
The completed body
Saturday’s expedition was the Seafair Torchlight 5k, where Mom, Dad, Rhys, Carol, Courtney and Aaron went as pirates, and I was the calamari that was running away from them. We got second in the group costume contest, beaten by people dressed up as the characters from Pirates of the Caribbean.
The mantle is made of tie-dyed cloth stretched over a paper and wire frame, while the tentacles are a wire frame inside a stuffed cloth tube that was also tie-dyed. Amazingly, we made almost the whole costume in one day.
Apparently I lied when I stated that the tongue would be next, for we have decided instead to flesh out the head with the standard cloth mache. The other side and the top of the head are looking good as well, but are not as far along as this side. While placing the cloth down though, we got an idea and covered up part of the eye so that it would look like the dragon was angry.
Next we plan to work on the neck and finish off the head.
After a long wait, there comes another picture showcasing a draconic trait. Obviously the trait shown here is the dragon’s new glass teeth. They are actually mostly yellow, but when the picture was taken light must of reflected off them, tinting them a bloody hue.
A close up of the teeth, giving them a very Tyrannosaur like look; most impressive. Also note the curved teeth in the back, which are clay and make the dragon look adapted for eating fish and large prey.
The horns here have been finished for quite a while, but for some reason never photographed. The cloth mache method was used to give them texture, using dryer lint and they were given a brownish green ink wash. The finished dragon will have horns with a very bronze hue. We may of gone a little overboard with the number of horns though, with two sets of goat horns near the neck, the little side horns below the eyes, the big rhino horn on the nose, and some horn-like whiskers around the mouth. Also, note the addition of eyes.
A side shot of the eyes being worked on, we hope to be able to add eye-lids by the end of the week.
Next: Tongue of Dragon
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
