Every year, my mom gets and ornament for my brother and I. It’s become our little tradition where the ornaments are hung on her tree, and someday my brother and I will take our respective ornaments to hang on our own Christmas trees.
Last year, I thought it’d be fun to make dragon ornaments for some family and friends. I wanted to make them as a special gift with an annual theme and dated by the year.
For 2016, I made a little angel dragon ornament. They were white with light blue eyes, gold accents, and feathered wings. It was my first time sculpting a flat back piece, and I had 11 to make. They also had issues with balancing properly and wanted to tilt either forward or backward, or flop to the side.
With one round under my belt, I set aside plans for improving 2017’s version.
This year, I wanted to roll with the theme of gingerbread and keep it classic with a brown “dough” and white “frosting.”
To help streamline the process (and help the ornaments balance a bit better) I decided to sculpt a master version of the head, body, tail, and legs, and make a mold from it once it was baked. I sculpted this master version with extra precision to help make sure the balancing was retained from the master to the ornaments.
From there, I was able to use the mold to make the bodies more uniform. I used aluminum foil in the center of the mold to keep the ornament lighter and help with even baking. I recorded this process via video just to give you a look at how this went.
The mold was only used for the very base of the ornament; all of the details (the face, head, ears, wings), and texturing were added to each piece individually before baking.
Once they were all cleaned up out of the mold, they looked like this:
I also shaded the bodies with chalk pastel to help give the dragon the look of baked gingerbread. Here are a few on my baking sheet ready to get their final bake:
Overall, they went through three bakes. The first one was after the head/body had all of the clay details added (minus the wings), I then made the wings and prebaked them so they wouldn’t lose their shape, and then I attached the wings to the body, baking them a final time for the most durable bond.
And for funsies, I took a picture of this year’s with last year’s ornament in the background. I realized the one I made this year is a little bigger than the ones I made last year (although it was very hard for me to keep them consistent), but I think it was a good size for them.
I’m not sure what theme I’ll do next year, but I can’t wait to see how it turns out. What theme do you think would make for a fun Christmas ornament?