Paint your dragon

Before I start on the writeup on this dragon sculpture project, I’d like to take a moment to shamelessly promote my Facebook page Castings of Cthulhu. Yes, it has the same name as my Etsy page. in some misguided attempt at branding. I’ll mainly be using the blog for the big meaty project writeups while the facebook page will be for updates, photos of work in progress and general whats going on. Thats if I remember to keep updating it.

Now, back to our regular programme.

This was a commission for someone who wanted it as a birthday present, so after a few chats about the requirements I had a rough idea of what the dragon had to look like. I began with a chunk of quartz and glued a blob of milliput to it. I had done something similar with the horned god and found the weight of the rocky base to be useful in keeping the piece in place and also as something to hold while working on it.

The armature was built up with wire and more milliput then sculpey was layered up over it, pretty much how all my other sculptures have been done. The wings had an under layer of car body wire mesh to build the shape. The bottom of the quartz was a bit too rounded off so I applied a few blobs of milliput and stamped them with a couple of rocks to give them a more natural finish. I also glued the quartz to a piece of plastic card to give it a flat base, this softened a bit in the oven when it was baked but stayed flat enough. Mental note, remember to check for plastic before baking next time.

Part of the way through I was getting a bit annoyed with the tail and how it joined onto the body. Originally it curled around the rock more but it was bent at an almost 90 angle at the base of the body and look stupid, so I dug down to the armature and bent it into a more gentle angle. It helped to give the body a bit more movement and looks much better.

I’ve been trying out some new tools I got for Christmas which are really nice to use, they’ve got rounded ends of different sizes and they really helped with getting the wrinkles, folds and other shapes smoothed out and formed.

Some time later, the whole thing went in the oven on a nice low heat for a couple of hours. I’ve been trying to do them for longer and lower which is resulting in less cracking and a nice hard finish.

Painting was a bit of a tricky one. I’m a bit of a sloppy painter so it took a few goes to get it tidy but the requirement was a green dragon/finish/skin/scale tone. Plenty of Games Workshop paint and ink died to get the final colours right.

There are more pictures of the project in my google gallery

This project was a bit of a first as I’ve never sculpted a dragon before but then theres a lot of things I’ve never sculpted before… a zombie… a fish… the cast of Fame…