This week’s dragon was inspired by the work of Melody Tallon over on Flickr. She has made a wonderful series of goblets, among other things, that just make me smile.
Click on any of the photos for a closer look.
Her surface techniques include having a textured base layer of clay covered with mica powders. Over that are beautiful squiggles, scrolls and dots of the main color. I found it utterly enchanting and wanted to make something similar in a dragon.
In order to do so Andrea had to be baked quite a few times. First after the initial shaping, texturing & mica powdering. Then I’d add dots & scrolls until I was pretty sure I’d squish something… another baking. More scrolls & dots… another baking, and so on until I felt like she was done.
If you’d like to see my other dragon creations so far, I’ve made a Thursday’s Dragon Pinterest board just for them.
For the wings I sketched out my design, scanned it into the computer and made a horizontally flipped copy. Both copies were placed under glass and I added the thin scrolled snakes over the drawn lines onto the glass.
Then I mixed mica powders with Translucent Liquid Sculpey and filled in various areas of the wings. These were baked right on the glass. While they were still warm out of the oven I used a blade to remove them from the glass and placed them over a bit of rolled up tissue so they’d cool into a slightly curved shape.
Check out this post on Errol, dragon #1, for the details on why I am making a dragon every week in 2015.
WOW, Andrea is beautiful. Those wings look like stained glass. It’s wonderful how you borrow techniques from other artisans and apply them in new ways. The goblets are awesome and creepy, btw. Don’t think I could comfortably drink out of them. O.O
Thank you, Robin! That’s exactly what I try to do: take a technique and make it my own.
Interesting that you don’t care for the creepy goblets; I love ’em! You like a different kind of creepy that I try to avoid. It would be a boring world if we all liked the same things. 🙂