Dragon Costume Materials

A list of the materials and techniques used to make a dragon costume.

This is an ongoing project, so this page will be updated as the costume is completed.

Cardboard

I’m using cardboard for the framework of the body and all the head pieces. The cardboard I have available is a single layer of board with a corrugated layer in between. This allows me to separate sheets easily with a strong edge that is hard to bend or squash. I am cutting out each piece and then taping them together into the correct shape with gaffer tape and packing tape. I’m adding extra thickness where needed by taping multiple pieces together, alternating the direction of each piece so that it adds strength rather than just layers.

I am not using PVA glue because it takes too long to dry, but if I wanted something extra strong that wouldn’t show I would use it to bond two pieces together before taping them up. If you are using thinner cardboard, you could also score along where you want to join two pieces then fold over one edge onto the other and secure with more tape or glue.

The dragon costume is made from a mix of store-bought and home-made components. As you can see from the accompanying photos, it’s an amazing costume. This blog post describes some of the materials I used in creating it.

I started with a commercial pattern for a dragon suit that I purchased on eBay. This pattern is excellent as far as it goes, but there are several areas where you need to add details to make the costume look realistic. Unfortunately, the pattern doesn’t tell you how to do this, so you’ll have to figure it out yourself. Fortunately, most of these things are not hard to do at all.

The first step is to gather the materials listed in the pattern, which is basically just fabric and thread. You can use pretty much any fabric you want; I chose cotton because it’s nice and stretchy.

Next step is to create the body of the dragon suit. To do this, follow the directions in the pattern carefully and try not to make any mistakes! If you’re like me, though, you will probably end up ripping out several seams before finally getting it right. This is OK; don’t worry about it too much because no one will ever notice once everything else comes together later on in process (if

“I bought this stuff to make a dragon costume for my son. I wrote up the process as a blog post in case it’s useful.

Last time he wanted a dragon costume, we made one out of a cardboard box. But this time he wanted something that looked more like the real thing, and would hold up to use as a regular costume.

We used:

2 rolls of green crepe paper

2 rolls of white crepe paper

imitation leather (one yard each of green and blue)

a sheet of foam rubber

plastic canvas (for the teeth)

some wire coat hangers (for the frame)

a glue gun, duct tape, and thread to hold everything together”

Coming up with the idea for a dragon costume was easy. I just thought of “dragon,” and searched to see if anyone else had made one. They had, in great numbers. But all the costumes looked like they were made by people who had never seen an actual dragon.

I decided to do some research: what materials do dragons have? And I started to list them: scales, teeth, claws, wings, fire. Then I went through each one in turn and thought about what would be the best material for that part of the dragon’s body.

Materials for making a dragon costume.

The dragon costume is made from foam and duct tape, so it’s fairly light weight. But because of the foam, it’s also pretty bulky. If you’re making a costume that you can wear to a convention, you’ll want to make sure it fits in your car!

I used the “One Hour Dress” pattern to make my dress. I had made the dress a few years back and decided to use it for this costume because of the way the neckline is cut (it was easy to add a collar). I altered the sleeves a bit so they fit better.

My main issue when making this dress was that I wasn’t sure how long to make it. Should it be long, like a princess dress? Or should it be shorter, perhaps knee-length? In the end, I opted to make it longer, but when I look at pictures of it now I think that knee-length would have been better.

I used double-sided fusible webbing for some of the applique pieces on my dragon costume. Basically, this stuff is stiff and gluey on both sides. You cut out your fabric pieces and place them where you want them on the base fabric, then iron down onto one side of the webbing (a little article with more info on fusible webbing). My biggest problem with using this type of webbing was that my applique pieces kept falling off as I was trying to sew them down! This could have something to do with the fabric I was using (it’s kind of shiny

The scale pattern is a little more complicated. The idea is that we want it to look like the scales are like overlapping shingles. I started with the head and neck scales. I bought foam sheets of different colors, and cut out all the scales with scissors. I glued them together in pairs, so that each pair would attach to the fur at two points. The way I did this was to glue one scale on top of another, then cut out a notch from the bottom scale so it could go on top of a section of fur, then glue it on.

Then for each color, I arranged the pairs into long strips–the long ones for the neck and head, a shorter one for the back of the neck and back, and a really short one for each shoulder. Once they were all arranged, I glued them all together in their respective strips (with lots of hot glue), sort of shingling them slightly so that some were not completely overlapped by others (but also making sure not to leave any gaps).

Finally, I sewed on snaps so that each strip could be attached to the fur.