accessories

Quick project I finished ages ago of a dragon tail. The material is actually an upholstery fabric, with foam backing. Amazing stuff. The scale pattern is really lovely, and it's soft & stretchy. None of the stiffness of vinyl or faux leather reptile pattern fabric. The horns are a very rigid 'plasticky' material, makes some tough horns indeed!

Working on a matching set of ears & head horns for this outfit.

cutting foam

One of the most useful tools in a costume builder's arsenal is the band saw. That, and an at-home scissor sharpener tool. It's amazing how quickly foam will dull a blade!

Makes cutting out curly tails a lot easier!

needle felting

Occasionally I'll get an itch to work on something totally different mid-project.

Needle felting is a lot of fun, if slightly dangerous. Those barbed needles are sharp!

Start of 2011

Start of the new year, start of some new fun projects!

For Further Confusion 2011, I'm building a brand new costume; my first puppy dog!

The fur was an amazing find. Super luxurious soft mid-length pile, in two-tone! It shaves very nicely, still retains a silky feeling, and seems to resist creasing/crimping no matter what torture the testing crew put it through. It's always pleasant to work with really quality materials. I bought miles of it, after doing such a great job haggling, so there might be a small flock of puppies romping about eventually.

Of course, the studio is absolutely a mess of muslin & fur & foam. But in the chaos, new life emerges! Exciting, woof!

moving

Since the company sale of Livejournal.com, I've been slowly navigating away from it's services. Not anything against them, they're still an excellent networking service and utility, but I'm a lot less interested in browsing there since their new policies were implimented.

You can still find my old blog there at phar.livejournal.com, which I will leave up for archival purposes. I've been using that blogger since 2003, when I first started up with all this making-art-all-the-time stuff! Wow, how time flies!

But out with the old, in with the new.

I'm keeping a public studio twitter at @findAdragon, and I'm working at using Flickr.com/dragonsquared to document on-the-go studio work.

It'll take some getting used to, but here's to new friends & stories. And fun new creatures!