Dragon Sculpting

A couple of weeks ago, Dee (my fiancee) and I went to a place called Clay Cafe, they let you pick up (or make your own) clay objects to paint. It was our first time but we both picked dragons, which were probably the more complex things there.

Man did we underestimate how long this was going to take, and good thing we went early. The entire process, which was just painting took about 5+ hours for us to complete. As you can see, he's not all that big, or even complicated for that matter, but in order to get a decent coat of paint on, you have to paint and dry everything three times.

 First thing I got squared away was the base. I tried to go for a hot-rock look by brushing in some red, its there but not very noticeable.

Moved on to the base body and outer wings, around this time I figured out I was going to make him blue-teal and red  (I had been debating it the entire time, well debating what colors to make him)

The finished, pre-fired product actually turned out pretty decent. There were some dabbers to add like globs of paint, so I used it to again try and make the rock base look more like lava was pouring over it. In this state it looked decent, didn't quite make it to the final cut but it was a nice shot. You can't really see it here, nor in the next photo but his face didn't turn out very good. The reason being, I didn't put enough coats of paint on it, partially because I couldn't tell what I had painted and what I didn't and also because this was heading into the final hour of our 5 hour stretch, and frankly I was tired.

The final result! I was pretty pleased with how well it turned out, save the face. All in all we had a lot of fun and it wasn't too expensive, like ~25$ and that covered the clay base and the 5 hours we spent there using their paints and what not. Definitely an experience I would recommend trying out.