THERE BE DRAGONS! pt 1

When we decided we were going to have a medieval party a couple of years ago, we knew what we needed to go in the backyard. Yes, a dragon. Pretty danged ambitious, I know, but definitely worth the look on guests' faces when we were done.

Read on and learn how to build your own Halloween Dragon Prop.

We wanted a big dragon, not some wimpy little dog-sized thing, but something big enough to eat you. We reasoned that to be able to eat a full grown adult the head alone would have to be about 6ft long and almost four foot tall! That was insane, and we were on a budget.

We decided that our dragon would be sleeping in the darkest corner of the yard, that way, we could make an impressive head, and make arms that would fade off into the shadows. The body would be more suggested than actually built, and if the head looked good enough, no one would notice.

It started with the sculpey maquette that you see at right. That gave us the general idea of the shape of the head, since that would be our main focus. We stopped by our local hardware store and picked up our main supplies:

• A few 8ft lengths of 3/4in PVC pipe
• Various elbow and T-joints
• A PVC pipe cutter (inexpensive and indispensable)
• A roll of chicken wire fencing
• A roll of light gauge wire
• Grey landscaping cloth
• A couple of cans of spray paint

From there we went to the fabric store and picked up some other necessities:

• Quilter's batting
• Upholstery foam
• Crafter's 1/8 thick foam
  
• A 12in green beach ball

Next post I'll show how how we started putting it all together.

THERE BE DRAGONS! pt 2

First it began with the framework. Using the pipecutter and various joints , we built a simple skeleton. We screwed a cross piece in the front to keep a cosistant spacing. You can use a purple PVC glue, but everything was tight enough that we didn't bother.

Next we began to sculpt the chicken wire around the frame using small pieces of wire to tie it to the frame an itself (gloves are very important with this step).


As we formed the chicken wire, our maquette became a handy reference. We left holes where the eyes and nostrils would be. You can see that we also added additional cross pieces for the cheekbones. Not only does this help define the jaw better, but it gives us more structure for the eye socket. Since we weren't creating an open mouth, we rolled the chicken wire at the bottom to suggest a division and give a place to anchor the teeth.

From there we added the batting. This we decided was the musculature. It allowed us to add more definition to the brows, nostrils eye sockets and cheeks. It also helped our creation to finally start looking like something.

Next post the work continues in our friends' backyard.

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 whittled 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