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Melody Pena

"female yard dragon wip copy.jpg" by Melody Pena

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SciFi and Fantasy Art female yard dragon wip copy.jpg by Melody Pena
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This is an old work-in-progress dragon . We never produced her, but I may get around to finishing her if we ever have time to think about new large dragons!

 She is large, about a foot long ( that is big for us!) and was intended to be cast in cement as a yard dragon. She has the rough "stone finish that our gargoyles have, but since we are no longer casting cement, I would want to give her a polished "fine finish " like our other dragons.That would mean a lot of sanding.




DateNameComment 
29 Mar 2011:-) Philip Andrén
Very nice! The detail is awsome as usual. 11

:-) Melody Pena replies: "Thank you so much! You’d certainly know about details! Your gallery is simply MAGNIFICENT! When I get a free moment I intend to pour over it."
25 Apr 2011:-) Marika Viklund
Awww, she’s beautiful! <3
Hey, you make your sculptures in clay first, then plaster and then a final form and cast it in porchlain right? Or something like that? Do you make the individual scales already in the first clay version and then detail it in the plaster or do you make all of it in the plaster? I’ve made this dragon head and am working on the scales atm, but your scales look so much better. 2 Any tips?

:-) Melody Pena replies: "I don’t put the final details in the first clay sculpture; I work up to them in following "generations" of castings. The first clay one will have blocked out areas of scales for composition ( I almost always totally change everything in the later sculpture!) I work out the actual scales onto a soft plaster casting with pencil,( by soft, I mean a plaster that is easy to carve in its "set" stage, there are many different types of plaster) and carve them into this plaster casting. This casting gets recast into a rock hard plaster that I then sand and polish until my arm falls off. It is extremely labor intensive!
"
27 Apr 2011:-) Marika Viklund
I can imagine it’s very much work! So you make like areas of "psuedo scales" in the clay, then refine and makes details in a soft plaster and then... Do you add more finer details in the hard plaster or just soften it all with the sanding? I don’t seem to be able to get my scales to look overlapping like yours do. They look like they’re just beside each other. I need to practice more! *lol* What do you make the forms in? Silicone or something harder?

:-) Melody Pena replies: " Yes, I designate areas of scales and their direction on the clay original. I refine them further in the soft plaster, but the bulk of the work is in hard plaster. I do add finer details to the hard plaster.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, no getting around it.
I carve a groove around each scale, then refine each one individually to be lower on the front end and higher on the back end, so it looks as if it is emerging from under the preceding scale. Then everything gets sanded and polished. Takes forever.
The molds are flexible silicone, the final "master" sculpture that the molds are taken from is cast of epoxy resin.
If you go to the "staff gallery" section under "community" in the forum section of our website , I have a gallery with some pictures of the molds we use.

http://www.windstoneeditions.com/image/tid/54

( You’ll have to search through the images to find them, links to individual images in that gallery never work."
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'female yard dragon wip copy.jpg':
 • Created by: :-) Melody Pena
 • Copyright: ©Melody Pena. All rights reserved!

 • Keywords: Art, Carving, Casting, Dragon, Editions, Garden, Gypsum, Melody, Pena, Sculpture, Windstone
 • Categories: Dragons, Drakes, Wyverns, etc
 • Techniques: Sculpture, Clay, Pottery, etc
 • Submitted: 2011-03-28 17:43:18
 • Views: 1606
 • Resolution: 800x694

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