Created In 2013. The dragon fountain has been one of our most ambitious creations. He started out an old umbrella stand, a lamp shade, a chest of drawers, and a vacuum cleaner hose. The umbrella stand and lamp shade are stacked upside down on top of each other to form the plinth at the base of the fountain. The drawers were some Ikea furniture that a neighbor was throwing away. We deconstructed the 6 drawers and re built them into a hexagonal wishing well style fountain bowl to hold the “water” at the base of the fountain.
The vacuum cleaner hose runs up through the body of the dragon to its mouth so he can belch smoke and fog on Halloween night. His internal skeleton is fashioned from pine wood furring strips, flanked by two thin sheets of plywood cut into the question mark shape of the dragon’s body.
This is the base structure for the dragon. To give him round form we cut many circular segments in a variety of sizes that scaled with his width. Each circle was then slotted into wood frame to round out the dragons body. The body was then wrapped in some foam rubber sheets used for lining cabinets to created a flatter surface for the paper maché skin that would soon cover the whole creature. Using a similar technique plus some wire to create some curved edges we added on the head and slotted some wings on his back. His arms are also made from wire wrapped in paper and tape.
With the body frammed out we filled any gaps the dragons skin with blue taper and paper and then coated him in several layers of paper maché. The final result was a sleek and sexy looking dragon with graceful curved facial features.
Next came the scales. There are over 500 individually attached scales on this beast. Each hand placed with a small ball of paper below it to make sure the scale would stick out and be curved. The scaled were circles we cut out of paper plates, we could have used poster board or some other cardboard, but paper plates we cheap and you could cut a stack of 5 or six of them at a time to save time and get about two dozen scales from one stack of plates.
After a long day and night of attaching scales, we were finally ready to paint the dragon. It took two full cans of gray spray paint to turn the fountain to stone. I then recruited my friend to help me paint silver tips on every single scale to give the dragon a flashy finish. We also painted in some facial features and some shading detail to the fountain base.
We sculpted 48 teeth out of Femo© polymer clay which you can bake in an oven to make it hard and waterproof. Those were then surgically inserted into the dragons mouth to give him a ferocious bite.
After that we placed him outside, hooked up the smoke machine and let the dragon unleash terror as the new centerpiece for our Halloween display. 
The Nightmare Before Halloween 
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