I wanted to put the spotlight on a fun project I finished up recently! In a way, this was kind of a collaboration with my husband. There will be many times where I’ll drag him into Michael’s, and he’ll see a craft supply item and get an idea. He is an extremely creative person who gets loads of ideas but doesn’t necessarily have the patience to create the item itself, so a lot of times that’s where I come in and take over.
Michael’s (along with just about any craft store) houses an unfinished wood items section that has things like plaques and letters, but they also carry seasonal items like the coffins I love decorating for Halloween, and birdhouses (you’ll see how I used these in the coming months). When my husband saw a treasure chest, however, he said it would be cool if I decorated the chest and created a treasure-themed dragon to fit inside.
I loved the idea so much, I bought the chest…last year.
Tucked away unfinished for months, I decided to take it with me to my art show in June to work on as a demo.
I painted up the chest ahead of time and prepped it to hold the dragon. It was way too tall for it to be seen, so I filled about half of it with aluminum foil. This let me prop my dragon base up toward the top of the chest. Later, I had to lower this a bit as my sculpture ended up being too tall to fit in the chest and close!
Along the way, I couldn’t shake wanting to use a deep red, and soon I realized where I wanted to go: a JSThreads-esque Smaug needed to be hoarding his treasure in this chest.
The base was the most time consuming part. I used Super Sculpey and aluminum foil to create a generic mound with a flat base. This would allow me to attach it into the chest once everything was sculpted. I gave it a few coats of gold paint once it was cooled so any potential gaps in treasure would more or less blend in.
And then I spent days making coins. I wish that was an exaggeration, haha!
While I used my trusty Kemper circular cutters, I still cut out many, many circles and strategically started building up the pile of treasure. I left a flat area in the middle of the pile for my dragon to fit into, and with this, I brought everything to my art show so I could start working on my dragon.
Smaug is a very hard dragon to find images of, at least images from various angles and with good enough lighting to get a sense of color and details. With that, there are also several interpretations of Smaug as well, so I decided I was going to do my own little interpretation. I chose dark red and black as my colors, and I thought it would be sweet to have him sleeping and cuddled around his treasure. This of course will be a more cutesy version of Smaug.
I mostly sculpted the dragon separately from the treasure base, but I did check it against the dragon every once in a while to make sure I was on track to fit well.
The dragon itself is pretty straight forward. I added a fin down the back for some extra flair, but otherwise I posed him so he’d be sprawled out with his arms and tail around his gold.
It was after the dragon was completed and more or less posed that I filled in the gaps. The coins gave me a base that started to surround him, and now I added other bits like gold bars, a goblet, and jewels (rhinestones) to truly make this piece complete.
For an extra touch, I added a little gold lock to hold everything together! I think the final piece turned out super cute, and I’m in love with his pose and the treasure pile! Overall, this piece measures 5″ wide, 3.5″ long, and about 3.5″ tall.
I’m also excited to announce that this set will be going up for auction on my Instagram account starting at noon PST on July 27 through 10 a.m. on July 29. Because of the different elements and the amount of work put into this piece, the bidding will open at $40 (does not include shipping).
I’ll have separate posts on my Instagram account announcing the auction and for the auction itself, but I wanted to announce it here since this post is dedicated to this little dragon. I haven’t done too many, but because this is much different from my typical project, I thought it would make a good candidate.
I hope to see you there!