Lizard Dragon

In this piece, my main focus was trying to capture the movement. Maybe as the sculptor I'm biased, but it feels like the images don't do justice to the movement it captures, because I do get the feel I was aiming for. The idea was to have this creature coming down this very steep mountain terrain in a hunting or aggressive manner.

I wanted to make something big and eye-catching, so I decided to go high and keep the base compact (15 by 15 cm). But a creature coming down a mountain needs a mountain, or at least part of one, so the sculpture became two parts. Building the armature for it was difficult. For the dragon, I made placeholders for the height of each leg, with open wires to be connected later to the actual terrain, so the armature inside would become one structure once they were joined. It was very difficult to handle and to connect.

The terrain itself was made from aluminum foil, wire and air-dry clay. With the dragon standing on it, the whole thing was too tall for my oven, so I had to finish the dragon completely, bake it, and only then connect it to the terrain. The air-dry clay helped here: I could move it around to fix the terrain so the legs sat correctly on top of it. Luckily, the spot where the two parts meet is almost invisible.

Beyond the sculpt itself, this piece was a major turning point for my painting process. My main reference for painting is YouTube miniature painting tutorials. There are similarities and differences. In general, this isn't canvas, and the figures I make are pretty small, so I think it's a decent reference. With that said, a major difference is the size. Most miniatures use a 28mm base, so the height would be no more than a couple of centimeters. My figures, on the other hand, are in the order of magnitude of 20 cm for a full figure (this one was 40 cm).

Miniature painting's primary paint material is acrylic paints. They are water-based and dry very quickly. But for my big figures, that's a problem. I had a hard time using those techniques on such a large scale. The feature of acrylics in the miniature world, the pro, becomes a disadvantage for me when I try to use it at my scale. I'm not saying one is better than the other, only that the techniques I tried didn't work out for my use case. The fix time before the paint dries is just very short. Part of that is that I'm not that technical with a brush yet.

Then I have oil painting. Unlike acrylics, oils dry much slower and are more forgiving to mistakes. You can fix a mistake hours after paint has been put in the wrong place, and blending is much more natural for me, as opposed to the common practice of layering in acrylics (thinly overlaying paints to create a blend).

This was the first sculpture where I tried oil painting, and I loved it. I succeeded in making icy thorns as well as a blazing hot stomach, and I got beautiful colors that I could control, blend and fix over the hours of work it took me to create the sculpture.