The Dragon of Misfortune
This creature is a character that I ceratitid a long time ago. She is the embodiment of 'misfortune,' therefore her design is based of bad luck elements such as clock eyes, broken glass, and the colors of blood. I decided to undertake the challenge of bringing her to life through clay. It was the most difficult sculpture I've ever made, clay or otherwise.
To start, I pulled out my old (albeit unfinished) original painting of the character. This design wasn't one orchestrated for a solid medium, but I wanted to get her as close to the initial design is I could anyway.
The next step was drawing some crude sketches to outline how the model would stand, seeing as the above drawing has the dragon floating. A key element to get across is the preparatory ease of the character's movement, but that conflicts with having to balance the weight of the clay.
From there I just took things one step at a time. The head is the most detailed piece and the cornerstone for the rest of the figure as it dictates the proportions. This is not the first time I've made a clay dragon's head (see below example) but it is the first time I've tried it opened mouthed. I found the trick to be making the jaw and skull separately then layering a skin of fresh clay over the face to make it look, quite literally, seamless.
The first dragon I ever made out of polymer clay. Stands about 5-6" off the table, including the quartz base.
After the head was the tail tip and forelegs. I did these next because I needed them to be baked solid before I tried to attach them to a body, lest I risk deforming them in the process. Additionally, the legs needed to prop the arching back up.
A trick if figure out with the tail was to bake it in a shaped (and supported) piece of paper to give it a curl upwards instead of having the entire fin lay flat.
Going in, I knew that trying to do any detail work on the body would be a real pain so long as it was floppy. Of course, attaching soft clay to hard clay isn't entirely easy, and while I had embedded wire to connect the head, arms, and tail, that wasn't a great option for all the fins. May way of working around this was to create core that was thick enough to lend support but still skinny enough to be easily masked. I then created a sort of 'cloak' to drape over it on which I could work the finer pieces.
In these pictures the dragon has had it's core recently baked. From the base of the head to the shoulders is the first (still wet) piece of the outer carapace. The wires sticking out will later attach to the wings.
One of the things that I should have better planned out was the length of the body. I ended up cutting out a significant section of the core near the tail to readjust the look as well as the balance of the beast. In hindsight, I should have also kept the hind legs in the design, but by the time I realized their support might be worth while there was no good way to position them around the tail without it looking very awkward. The dragon still lists to her right a little, but fortunately the tail succeeded in it's job of keeping her upright.
The fins were a time consuming task, but they weren't terribly difficult. I pretty much rolled out the clay like cookie doe and cut out the pieces. Unsurprisingly, a couple pieces curled over too much when baked, but those were fixed by simply breaking them off and reattaching them upright with some superglue. I was impressed by how the majority of them held form just fine.
The wing arms were a synch. That is until my bird decided they'd make good perches after they'd been baked. I think I re-glued the right wing at least tree times.
This is the result form before the painting.
Painting the dragon went smoothly for the most part. I ended up putting her on a box barely big enough for her so I could get around to a lot of hard-to-reach spots.
The glass wings was a risk because the weight of it could easily break the arms. Fortunately, with patience and a lot of hot glue, I made it work. And boy, was the result worth it!
She's far from a perfect specimen, but this experience has taught me a lot about the limits and extent of polymer clay.
