One day, as I was traversing YouTube, I came across a really neat tutorial. It’s called “How to make a Dragon Island” and its from the channel How to.
I was inspired to make my own version of a dragon island but expand it a bit. I started this project in January of this year and only finished it last month, but it was a really fun project! Since this whole thing was a bit of an experiment, it’s something I designed for my own personal collection, so I kept parts of it fairly simple.
The base
In the video, they set the whole thing up in a plastic container. I decided to use a glass container instead. Using the last bits of my Easy Cast epoxy resin, I poured the first layer mixed with sand.
I started playing with Castin’ Craft polyester resin that is supposed to do well in thicker layers. The odor was too strong for me to pour inside our apartment, even with ventilation, so I had to wait several months for the weather to be warm enough.
However, in the meantime, I could work on the bits and pieces I was going to put on the sand. I was inspired by the video to make my own skeletal dragon. The head was the most important part for me because I wanted it to look really cool. I sculpted other bone pieces, all from white clay, to form a very simple skeleton. It’s really not meant to be anatomically correct.
Once the clay bones were baked, I treated them to washes of yellow, brown, and black paint to make them look more like bones. I thought they ended up amazing for my first try at a skeleton!
The island
Another part I could tackle while waiting for warmer weather was the island itself. I didn’t want this to be too heavy. I knew I needed to place the island while the top layer was curing, so it had to be. To do this, I sculpted the entire island from air dry clay.
Again, I kept the island itself very simple: the top became textured grass and the bottom was just earth. I wanted to make some simple island additions too, so I sculpted a tree and bush. This style has always been the way I drew trees, so I feel like it’s very representative of me!
Once everything was dried, it was time for paint! I did play with some shading and highlighting here, mainly to give the tree some texture.
My experience with air dry glue is fairly limited, but I found PVA glue worked beautifully in attaching the air dry clay. It feels surprisingly sturdy.
Pouring the resin
It was May before it was warm enough to pour the resin. I had previously poured a very thin layer of resin to set my dragon bones and other inclusions like shells and glow-in-the-dark barnacles I sculpted. I also tried to fill any problematic gaps to avoid air bubbles later on.
Since it was my first time doing this, I wasn’t sure if I had gotten my volume calculations correct. Spoiler alert—I didn’t; I guesstimated based on filling half of the container with water and I was very off. It also turns out I picked a very finicky resin.
I had chosen the polyester resin specifically for it being a casting resin and not just a coating resin. It still has to be poured in layers. With each layer the catalyst has to be decreased because the heat from the previous layers helps cure the next. The volume of the layer also played a part in how much catalyst you needed to use. The thicker the layer, the less you needed.
By the time I reached the last layer (I poured 6 layers), I was down to 1 drop and my layers still ended up getting too hot and cracked in places. If I was to do this again, I would pour thicker layers so I could do fewer.
With that said, one of the coolest parts of this resin is that it got gummy pretty quickly after the pour. This allowed me to pour the layers quickly to minimize seams between layers of resin. I could also add fun inclusions, like iridescent glass bubbles, at different layers. I just love how they look in resin!
When it was time for the last layer, I let it get gummy before setting my island on top. It was here I noticed the resin start to crack, but it was out of my control at this point.
The dragon
The dragon is the project I worked on for the Moscow Artwalk this year. I polled my Instagram followers to see what colors they thought of when they heard the world “island.” I narrowed down the colors that were provided, found a palette, and got to work on the dragon!
I thought it would be nice to play off of time passing and generations, so I made a marbled dragon egg to complete the scene. There’s the ancestral dragon skeleton underneath, a present day dragon sleeping, and a dragon waiting to see what the future holds for it.
While overall, I love the idea of this project, the most disappointing thing for me was how much the glass magnified the base. The base was my favorite part of this whole project, and while you can tell there’s something in there, a lot of the details are lost. But this is the point of experimenting, right?
This was such a big project for me that I knew I was going to feature it on my blog, but I was originally imaging this being a fairly successful story. This just goes to show that you can still be proud of your not-so-sucesses 
.