I’ve been debating on doing this for a while. I don’t get to use my mascot/business card holder very often as is, and I wanted to get a little more life out of my current one, but, to celebrate my first truly serious year for JSThreads, I decided it was time to update one of the first dragons people will see when they visit me at shows.
This blog post is all about the process of recreating the little yarn-loving dragon from my logo. I made the first rendition for my very first artwalk almost two years ago.
I was so happy with the way he turned out, and I received so many compliments for him. Even though my style had continued to noticeably change after he was created, I brought him to my shows last year, and people were again fascinated by him there.
Alas, as I’m looking at my third round of shows, I thought it would be fun to put I’ve learned since the early summer of 2015 to the test and give this little dragon a makeover. Overall, he’s about 5 inches tall and holds my business card much better than the previous iteration.
For the first dragon, I used a flat piece of clay for the base and then some foil on the inside of the yarn ball, but I jammed the two pieces together and hoped for the best while it was baking with the dragon balancing on top. This most recent round involved creating an armature that encompassed both the base and the yarn ball, so that they were attached from the start. This presented it’s own unique challenges that I didn’t fully consider beforehand, but overall the sculpt is much stronger.
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- Color palette
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- Base armature
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- Dragon armature
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- Working on the base
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- Working on the dragon
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- Dragon pre bake
Improvement:
- Thanks to the armature in the base, it is now sculpted as one piece and is much sturdier
- The overall sculpt is a lot smoother than previously
Things to improve:
- The look of the yarn ball, perhaps make it a little smaller next time
- My colors strayed a little from the original, particularly the teal
Here is the new mascot/business card holder. The cards will go between the dragon and the yarn balls attached to the base at the front.
And here is a comparison between the 2015 and 2017 versions. The new one is quite larger than the original.
I ended up sculpting this guy while I was live streaming too! So that was pretty exciting. I’ll probably stick to Instagram for streaming primarily, but I definitely want to get my Facebook followers involved too! Stay tuned for those if you like watching people sculpt like I do!