If you’ve been following me on social media, you know I’ve been participating in my first ever collab for the past five weeks. Along with a group of ladies on Poly Clay Amino, I’ve been creating polymer clay pieces around the theme of the five elements: water, air, fire, earth, and metal. As I’m sure you suspect, I made elemental dragons for each of these themes.

Since we shared our last post last week, I wanted to dedicate this week’s blog to share more information about what went into each dragon, and my thought process as I created each one.

Water

Water was our first element. I wanted to use this opportunity to create a merdragon. I’ve only ever created a couple merdragons, so I thought this would be a fun way to get some more practice. When it came time to choose a color scheme, I wanted to stick to more blue tones as I’ve used teals in the past. This gave me a pretty monochromatic color palette, and I was able to mix up a beautiful deep blue for the main color; it provided great contrast against the waves, too.

I knew I wanted to incorporate the element itself in the piece; normally I accomplish this by using resin, but I wanted to do things a little differently this time, so I created waves. This was my very first time doing this, and I have to thank a tutorial on YouTube for help on getting started. It was a fun process, and I definitely hope to do other projects with waves very soon!

Air

Before I even started air, I got this little glimmer of an image in my mind of a dragon stretched out in clouds, floating on a breeze. I tried to mix up a color palette that was “airy” to accompany this. Since clouds were going to play a big part, I knew I was going to rely heavily on shades of white and other light, cool colors. I decided to mix up a white that had just a touch of black in it so it would be able to stand out from the white cloud base I knew I wanted to create.

My pride and joy of this sculpt, however, is the wings. I reused the mold I made for my Christmas angel dragon ornaments, but I only had a mold for the left side of the body. Sculpting a wing from scratch for the right side would have taken me several more hours, and I would risk having it be too different from the other wing, so I decided to settle for a middle ground. I took bits of clay and pressed them into each individual feather of the mold and then rearranged everything for the other side. I was able to get something much more similar (but not a perfect match) to the original wing while saving myself some time. In the end, they were my favorite part of this dragon, and I think they help convey that “air” feel.

Fire

Fire is always the element I struggle with the most. How do you make clay look so free forming and irregular? How do you make clay the embodiment of fire?

It started while I was creating the face. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if I could make the scales look like little flames coming up from the body?” So I experimented with blending colors into each other with a ball tool to create some texture. The photos do not do the face justice, in my opinion. Each scale moves from yellow, to yellow-orange, to orange, to orange-red, to a mostly red-orange color, with a fairly soft transition. I think this technique worked best for the face, but overall I’m happy with how the flame turned out.

Another big thing for me was the base. I was trying to incorporate some kind of piece that would contrast nicely with the orange dragon, and that’s when I went for a charcoal look. I’ll be posting a tutorial on how you can achieve your own polymer clay charcoal look next week, so stay tuned for that!

Earth

Earthen tones are so pretty. I was inspired to do a variety of greens and a couple shades of browns for this piece, allowing me to stay true to the earth element. Then, I thought it’d be fun to add some earthy touches to the dragon itself and create a little base for some of the other elements I wanted to include (dirt, grass, and rocks, in particular).

This was another dragon where I had imagined the pose for him before I even had the palette down; I knew this dragon needed to be at peace within its element. The medium green color was the main driving force of this dragon. I played around with adding moss here and there to bring in some of the other greens to the body, and once I was happy with that, I decided to add some mushrooms, moss, and leaves on the tail to make it look like it was growing out of a trunk. I molded the base around him, texturing the dirt and rocks.

Metal

I couldn’t help but think of incorporating steampunk when it came to the metal element. I didn’t want to be too heavy with it, so it’s mainly the head, wings, and wind up key in his back. The rest of him is metal plating and other accents to make it look like he’s been pieced together. When I was looking up inspiration and reference images for this piece, I found a lot of steampunk creations that had green or red robotic eyes. I decided to make one of the eyes a bright green glow in the dark eye while the other is a giant screw.

For the rest of his body, I decided I wanted to do armored spikes down the back and layers of metal built up on top of each other (although I didn’t end up doing this as much as I thought). My husband came up with the idea for the super sweet wings using gears and elaborate clock hands, and I think I was able to execute it pretty well.

And there you have it! A little insight into creating each dragon for this elemental collab. I had so much fun working with the other four ladies in this group, and it was amazing to see what they came up with for each element.

If you could have control over any of these elements, which would it be? As much as I love earth, I think I’d have to say I’d want to have control over air. You could fly, that way, right? 🙂 I’d love to hear your answers in the comments below!