Fiery Dragon

Wanna know what I have been up to the last few days? I made a dragon. It's a birthday present for a friend. The special challenge about it was that it had to spread its wings, it's got to be feather light and it's got to be glued to a stick, because it's supposed to be a hair accessory.

I used a thin but stable wrapping paper, tissue (as found in shoe boxes), wire, sesame seeds, acrylic paint and watercolor, feathers and prepared feathery wings, and one wooden chopstick.

♠ I started out with an origami dragon from wrapping paper. The Fiery Dragon model is designed by Kade Chan and I used this Tadashi Mori video tutorial. 

♣ To stuff the body I used a string of tissue, wrapped around a wire to make the bending of neck and tail easier and to give it a good deal of stability. 

♥ I used tissue shavings and a 1:1 glue/water mix to cover everything - this makes the origami look less prominent and thanks to the glue the paper becomes quite hard and stable. In one go I glued also the sesame seeds to give it a scaly structure. 

♦ Now it looks like this: One can see the ugly colored wraping paper shine through the tissue. 

♠ The next step was to glue the feathers to the wings. Part of them were already pre-glued (the bright ones), so I had some orientation on how to make it look (more or less) like a wing. 

♣ And last but not least, of course, the coloring: I did the first step of this (orange undercoat) before glueing the feathers. After that I added a very diluted black and then details in black and gold. Oh, and I glued two plastik "sparkle stones" for eyes. Then I had to cut a hole into the belly of the beast to glue the chopstick. (It's always a shame to destroy something you just made. And in this case it's also pretty cruel. But, alas, it had to be done.) 

♦ Finished work:


Sorry the pics are a little blurred. Still hope you like it!

Edit: Some new pics, this time showing the dragons purpose in the hair of the presentee!