Big Dragon, Big Trouble WIP

So this....... If you want to know what's been eating up my time and driving me up the wall, this guy is it.

Let me tell you a little story; my school has one of the best sculpture-labs in the area, we even have a five-foot electric kiln! So when I had to sculpt an animal for my sculpture class last quarter I decided that bigger was better, and made this guy. Over the course of the two months I've had to work on him he has broken a total of four times and I have had to resize him just to fit into the kiln a total of three times.

When I say this guy is epicly huge, I'm not exaggerating. My teacher and other faculty members in the lab have commented that this is the largest project they have seen attempted in their career, and not just for the size of the kilns but for also for the tensile strength of the medium. I have literally pushed this clay to its absolute limit in both form, size, and stability.

So here we have two pictures of him from the side. I attempted to sculpt every single scale but at the fourth repair I had to cut my losses and determined that having most of the scales rendered would have to do. (Not to mention the fact that my technique for sculpting the scales was what made the sculpture so weak in the first place.)

Originally I had planned on glazing him so that he would be able to stay outside for the summer months and guard our garden, but I have a deadline to keep and keeping the deadline means that I will probably only have time to fire him once and then paint him.

So the lesson I learned was that a big dragon can be big trouble!