Game of Thrones Dragon Egg Sculpt

[gr8a]

I know it's been awhile since season one aired and we saw dragon eggs on Game of Thrones, but I only started the show last year. And from the moment I first saw Daenerys hold her wedding gift, I knew I had to have one.

However, it wasn't for a few more months that I starting making one, after I started making a baby dragon of my own too. I chose to make Drogon, the black and red dragon who is pretty much the one closest to Dany, and biggest and strongest. After this, I decided to make an egg to match my dragon, which meant it had to be the black one, seen in a few pics from the show below (farthest from the camera in the shot of the three eggs).

I started by crumbling up a bunch of newspaper into a ball and wrapping it in masking tape to get a base for the egg, adding more layers until it looked right-ish. I don't have any pictures of this step, because I didn't realize at the time what an in depth process this would be - I thought it would be a quick craft. This always happens to me.

Next, I covered the whole surface in Apoxie Sculpt (AS). I had never worked with this material before, so I learned as I went. After coating it all, before the AS cured, I pressed one end with various pieces of lumpy limestone and rough concrete and whatever other rocks I could find to add the stone texture on the bottom.



Then, I gave it a hard look, decided it sucked, and was the wrong shape to boot. I abandoned the project for a week in despair.

Picked it up later, decided it wasn't doomed and that all I had to do was widen the midsection to take it from ugly goose egg to rounder ostrich egg. I also started to figure out the AS a little better and went a little crazy smoothing it out. (Not sure why my pics are sideways or how to fix... any tips from more experienced users?)



Then I set it down for another week, not looking forward to sculpting a million scales. And as I started, I once again did not think ahead. No grave consequences, fortunately, I just hadn't considered the fact that the first row of scales would set in stone the number of scales there would be per row, as well as dictate the approximate size of every scale until almost the top. I think I estimated fairly well though, fortunately.



Then I added a few more rows, and smooshed my hard work with some more texturing. In the show, the scales closest to the bottom appear to be fossilizing or blending into the rough texture, with some scales almost invisible. I tried to replicate that too. (I guess I got some dirt in the AS, but I would later dig some of that out or just paint over it)



If you have a keen eye, you've already spotted another major mistake I made. I made the whole base egg one smooth shape, without thinking about how the scales would add bulk. The first few rows of scales stick out a good bit wider than the bottom rough part does. In fact, I made the base pretty much the size and shape I wanted the final piece to be, meaning the final was larger than expected. A chronic issue of mine. I probably noticed this at the time I was making it, and after adding a few more rows of untextured scales...

\

I dropped the project for two and a half months.

It was just a ton of work to mix up each mini batch of AS, sculpt each and every scale by hand, fighting with the stickiness of the AS when it first was mixed, and then the stiffness after working with it, waiting for a row or two to harden (an hour or two) before I could add the next row (so as not to accidentally smudge or dent the previous ones). I wanted to do this all from scratch, no templates for the scales, so that they wouldn't look too regular, but it was just getting to be a lot. I had probably done about 100 scales at this point, and I wasn't loving the result.

Fortunately, I find that with time, I look back less harshly on my own work, and I felt okay enough with it to pick it back up. Also I thought it would be cool if I could carry the egg at one day of an upcoming con, and then the hatched dragon the next day, so I got back to it. I drew a line on the egg base to try to keep the scale rows from going crooked and also see my progress, inch by inch.



Of course I got distracted for another month, and then suddenly it was just a couple weeks before the con! I whipped off the last few rows of scales over the next couple weeks while apparently not sleeping ever.



But then I had to figure out how to start reducing the number of scales in the rows, or they would start to get really tiny, which they're not supposed to. I also had to figure out how to top it off. Honestly, I'm not sure what I did to accomplish this. I guess I started putting a few on at different angles, varying the size here and there, and just messing with the pattern til it looked right. I stared at reference images like this shot from the Game of Thrones Exhibition that I brightened up to try to show the detail better, and then gave it some artistic license because it was still really hard to see and there was no shot like this of the black egg anyway.



Finally, I was pretty happy with most of the egg! The bottom and it's misshapenness still haunted me though. I decided to add more AS and retexture it to try to blend the new pieces in, and give me a better transition to the scales, and a rounder bottom in general. I toned down the odd shape after comparing to shots from the show, rather than pictures of what I'm 99% sure is not an original version of the prop, which was displayed in the exhibition at some point (on the left in the pic below)



Now that I was super happy with the shape, I decided to go all out and fix the minor issues I had with a few of the scales being too flat or divoted. I went over each scale, adding a little marker dot to the ones that I wanted to add more AS to or sand down irregularities. Then it was perfect and ready to paint! I gave it a coat of white primer, as I wasn't sure how well regular acrylics would stick to AS. Had to do it on two separate days, so that I could flip it over without the risk of denting the primer as I sprayed the bottom.



Then I started painting by hand. Painting isn't my thing, so it took some figuring out. It took forever just to do a base coat of black, making sure to get in every cranny of the "stone" part and every edge of every scale. If I just slopped a bunch of paint over it in with a big brush, I feared I would fill in all the gaps and lose the detail, so I used a small brush. Still dunno if that was the best method or not. I ended up sanding off the top black layer of paint off of the rough bottom, as the high points of that texture are lighter in the show.



Then I continued painting, adding red over the black. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to give it dimension with the red, until I realized that I was painting in really poor lighting. So when I brought it outside to see in natural light, it looked very different than it did inside. After all this, I realized that the eggs don't really look that vibrant or variegated in the show after all, and that the "black" egg was really a dark brown, or I suppose you could say black with red shining through.



So, I darkened it up some more, sprayed a clear coat to protect it, and brought it to the con! I'm pretty proud of how it turned out; after all the thoughtless errors I made along the way, I managed to fix them pretty well! Five months of on and off work produced this. Somewhere over 300 individually sculpted scales, hand painted, with a great weight to it.



Next up, learning how to make a brush-on silicone mold (I think) and hollow cast in resin! I've only done tiny, solid casts before, but I think having a lighter version of this would be pretty handy. The Apoxie Sculpt resulted in an egg with some heft, which I like, because I imagine it's almost as heavy as the real thing ("the ages have turned them to stone") but it would be a lot easier to carry around at a con if it was hollow, backed with expanding foam maybe.

 

[Jintosh]

Very nice. Looks great.