Monday, October 15, 2007

THERE BE DRAGONS! pt 3

The landscaping cloth skin was the next part of our dragon project. Tacking it down in different spots with a needle and thread helped control how closely it stayed to the "muscle" layer of batting and gave us some great character wrinkles. You can see the beginnings of one of his hands beside the head. These were hollow rolls of chicken wire wrapped with batting and landscaping cloth with twine wrapped around to define the knuckles. The claws were sheets of craft foam, loosely wrapped in a cone shape and set into the hole left at the end of one tube. The tube fingers were wired to a larger "palm" piece of chicken wire.

Once both hands were built, spray paint was judiciously applied. We decided that the gray of the landscaping fabric was not a bad base color, so we wouldn't have to soak it, but we wanted a little color to it. Rust color spray primer was cheap and coated well. As you can see in the picture to the right, the rust was used almost as highlights and a can of black gave us the shadows.

This next picture is a little blurry, but you can see some of the other details that we added. The horns and teeth were cut from the upholstery foam, a wire was stuck in the center to control the curve, and we whit
tled away at the edges to give them a better shape. We spray painted some shadowing and wired them to the head.
We propped the back of the head up with cinder blocks so that he was looking down at you. Since the dragon would mostly be viewed a night, we elected to tie fabric to posts to suggest a shoulder and arms. You can also see some of the other props -- singed armor, bones and treasure -- starting to accumulate around his base. That glint of silver in his nostril is part of the dryer vent piping we added and connected to a fog machine. We cut the green plastic ball in half and mounted them with clip lamps (with low wattage bulbs) to the inside of the eye sockets.

When the trick-or-treaters arrived, the yard was somewhat dimmer than this last picture. I stood behind to operate the smoke coming out of his nostrils while others greeted guests and showed them to the candy bowl... which lay right beside his nasty teeth.

Our beloved dragon has since become part of a local non-profit's yearly Haunted Forest

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