The making of blue dragon from Pern

Every so often, I manage to get progress pictures of felting things like a horse, Viking, and a Wizard.. There's been a few times I took progress pictures of making a dragon, but always hesitated to share them...because for so long the dragon looks absolutely terrible.

But! I think the progress pictures are really valuable for those who are learning to needle-felt and are feeling discouraged. Even though I've made 30+ dragons, I still--every single time--have the dreadful feeling of, "Is this actually going to work out?!" The important thing is to keep going from there. Wool is a forgiving medium. You can always pack in more wool, or even chop some off.



I had a request for a blue dragon from the Pern series. It's been probably 20 years since I read them, so I had to do a little research. Thankfully, there's a Pern wiki! Here's some quotes from it:

Dragons were carnivorous, oviparous, warm-blooded creatures. Like all of Pern's native large fauna, they had six limbs - four feet and two wings.

...
Their head and general body type was described by McCaffrey as being similar in shape to those of horses. They had small headknobs, similar to those of giraffes, and no visible ears.
...

Unlike the dragons of Terran legend, they had a smooth hide rather than scales; the texture of their skin was described as being reminiscent of suede with a spicy, sweet scent when clean. They were described as having forked tail ends with a defecation opening between the forks; however, most artistic renderings depict their tails as having spade-shaped tips.
...
According to the Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, the variety of colors were based on the amount of nickel, cobalt, and iron in the dragons' skin. In the real world, the oxides of these 3 elements are notably used for making green, blue, and reddish-brown dyes, respectively, which are the 3 most common colors of dragons.

I also found some description--and depiction--of the dragons on this fan website





Armed with that info, I dug through my stash for the most cobalt blue wool roving that I have. Sadly, it's merino wool. Merino is such a silky, soft wool that it doesn't really like to tangle/felt. This makes it take a LOT longer to work with! I highly recommend starting with a rougher wool, like Romney, to start off with.

On to the making! First, we start off with a pipe cleaner. A pipe cleaner isn't really necessary, and can sometimes be a pain. But, a lot of people like them for making the tail attach to things, or to make the neck easier to pose. I don't have the wire going all the way to the end of the tail, because it tends to poke out of the roving, especially if there's only a thin layer of roving.

It's a snake! A very fluffy, terrible snake. Just wrapping the cotton pipecleaner with wool

I've found it really helpful to wrap AROUND the pipecleaner, to make it harder for the pipe cleaner to pop out. If I just lay the wool along it and felt it down, the wire will often try to become exposed in various places.

Adding more shape and wrappign roving tightly around the tail area, so the pipe cleaner doesn't pop out.

I see a lot of tutorials where people will felt the legs and body seperately and then try to felt them together. I feel like this is going to be a much weaker bond--and the legs might fall off--then felting the legs and body together early on. The downside of this is, things look terrible for quite some time. For a long time, there's no part of the dragon that looks decent!

While everything is loose and fluffy, I add on some fluffy wool for the legs, I attach one side, fold it at the length of the leg, and then attach the other part of the roving to the body

More legs attached. Look how terrible it looks! It's hard to have faith that it'll turn out.

I do the same with the wings as with the legs. Though, I make a rough wing shape first. The shape of the wing is made by getting a wide piece of roving and folding it thrice at the places where a dragon wing has joints.

After I make a wing, I superimpose it upon the second wing. I want the wings to match!

One of the hardest parts of making a dragon is the wings. They are thin, so they are hard to felt. If you felt THROUGH them to the other side of the wing too much, you get a weaker wing with tufts coming out the side. You kind of have to felt diagonally into the roving to get the best felting, or felt shallowly.

Rough wing shapes. Have faith, you can make them better!

I usually have the "bones" of the wings a darker color than the "webbing" of the wing. This makes them seem a bit more translucent. I add the boning after attaching the "webs" of the wing. I constantly check to see if they are symmetrical, and then fix accordingly.

They look a bit more like wings

One has 'bones'

A good way to check and see if the wings are symmetrical is to fold them straight up. You can then felt tighter in some areas, or add more wool in other areas, to get them to match better.

At this point, I moved from the wings to a leg. I'll come back to the wings later.

Those back legs in my last picture of the previous post looked SO BAD. Time to put some work in! Wool felts down an amazing amount. In this picture, you can see I've felted down one back leg (and added a bunch more wool to it), while I haven't worked on the other leg at all.

Look at the difference in the hind legs!

When felting an animal (or pretty much anything 3D), it's important to look at it from many angles. It might look fine from one side, but terrible from another! Here you can see just how scrawny the upper back is compared to the rest of the dragon. It needs more work (and more wool!)

So much more work is needed!

By the time of this next picture, the snow outside had melted a bit, and the legs of the dragon had been felted a bit more.

Legs looking better. Head and tail are still very undeveloped!

Lots more stabbing later (it takes a surprising amount of time to stab wool until it's stiff). You want to stab and stab at the wool until it's stiff. If you don't, you're felt figure will very easily lose shape--and might even lose wool.

Here's a good example of when I needed to use scissors on the dragon. The head had been weirdly shaped (too wide too far back), so I used scissors to snip away the excess wool.

Everything has been felted a lot more. The head still needs much more work.

For the forked tail, I utilized the power of wet felting. If I were to to needle felt it, it'd take a long time, and I'd likely stab my fingers a lot. So, I roughly needle felted them (so they wouldn't fall apart in the water) and then soaped them throughly and scrubbed them in hot water. I've found that copious amounts of soap are REALLY handy when wet felting. If you don't have enough soap, the wool wants to stick to you, rather than itself. This makes felting hard, and often makes the felted thing fall apart.

View from above. Dragon has it's forked tail!

Here's how the dragon currently looks. Taking pictures in the snow is hard! But, I don't really have good lighting inside. I took these pictures in the morning, but then my daylight hours were spent doing dishes, tending the fire, sledding hills, getting my kids to do their school work and making dinner. These winter daylight hours go by too fast!

This picture has pretty good lighting, though the blue is a bit lighter than it actually is. Now the dragon has the giraffe-like nubs!

Color is better in this one, but the detail is less

I tried to get a view from above, but it ended up blurry. If there's another snow day tomorrow, I'll try to get another picture.

Looking at it from above makes me wonder if I should add more mass to it's upper back. It looks a bit but-heavy!

Anatomy on imaginary creatures is hard. Should a dragon be chonky and dinosaur like, or more serpenty? Does this one look horse-like enough to be a Pernese dragon, or is it too slender and it's neck too long? I feel like, maybe, it's butt is too big, and I need to add more mass to it's shoulders and upper back. Thoughts?

Wow!

That's so beautiful!

The blue Pern dragon wanted a friend. In his search, he somehow managed to transport himself to another world, one full of fairies! I finally got a chance to get more pictures of the dragon, and his friend joined him for the photoshoot.

Lonely dragon needs a friend.

The meeting of our dragon and his fairy friend

View of the fairy and dragon, from above.

Time for a ride!

I'm a great fan of the Anne McCaffrey books and loved reading about all the differences attributed to each colour dragon.

You been so patient getting to the final little dragon, and moulding the body parts so well in felt, I can't wait to see your further efforts of life on Pern.

Beautiful!!!

I forgot to mention that the blue dragon now has some more dragony friends! I tried to make them to scale, which was a little fun because the blue one is already at his new home. But, the green dragon should be the smallest, with the brown dragon larger than the blue, and the bronze dragon the largest. The bronze was fun to make, because bronze is such a tricky color and rather close to gold. I wanted to make sure that, if a gold dragon was made, it would look different than the bronze.

To make the bronze shiny, I used a mix of red and yellow silk roving. It was so soft to work with, and super shiny! I really wish my camera was better at picking up on the shine.

The dragons found some rocks to sun on!

Size comparison! The bronze dragon took so much longer to make, as I had to blend the silk roving to get a bonze hue. And it's much larger!

I couldn't resist stacking them up!

They flew off over a month ago to be with their hatchling. I hope they're having a great time!

They are hanging out as guests of a hibernating older dragon, awaiting an encounter with small humans they might impress upon...

I'm so glad they made it safely there, and I hope they get to impress on some youngsters soon!

Awesome!