Dragon Costume: A blog around the different parts of a dragon costume and how to put it together.
All information is provided as-is, with no warranty or guarantee as to its accuracy.
Introducing Dragon Costume!
This blog documents my experience of creating a dragon costume. My goal is that you can use these articles to make your own dragon costume, whether you’re on a tight budget or have plenty of money to spare. I hope you enjoy reading the articles and feel free to comment with any questions or advice!
Build your own dragon costume !
I will show you around the different parts of a dragon costume and how to put it together.
The video is made from an old youtube-video that I converted to .ogv and merged with my audio (took some hacking but I got there).
The images are my own photographs, taken with my phone and edited with gimp.
(I am not a professional photographer so please be nice).
Making a dragon costume is quite easy, if you have a few basic tools. This blog will walk you through the steps of creating your own dragon costume.
1. Design your dragon:
Your first step is to take some time to think about what kind of dragon you would like to create.
2. Create the base for your costume:
You will want to start with the base for your costume, and build upon that base as you add more elements.
3. Add the legs:
The legs are one of the most important parts of your costume, as they will be doing most of the walking!
4. Add wings:
Wings are another essential element of most dragons, and can be made from a variety of materials.
Making a dragon costume is not very hard, but there are many details that need to be considered. We will go through them one by one.
The most obvious and at the same time hardest part of a dragon costume is the dragon head. The head should be as big as possible to be impressive, but at the same time it should be light enough and easy to wear. The size and weight depend on where you want to use the dragon. If you just want to take some pictures in your backyard you can easily make something as big as 1 meter (3 feet) high, if you want to walk around and dance on a festival you may consider something half or even a third of this size. You will also need help in making such a big head, so we made something smaller for our first try: about 40 cm (1 foot) high.
Second most important thing is the material used for the head itself: It should be light, cheap, durable and easy to work with. Our choice was foam board which is quite cheap (about 5 euro/m2) and light (about 200g/m2) while being stiff and easy to work with. It is also easy to cut out all parts of the head with a jigsaw, drill holes for
Dragon Costume Ideas
In order to make your own dragon costume you will need to find a pattern. For my costume I used McCall’s Pattern M4848. You can find this online from a variety of different sites or in the store. For me the hardest part was finding the right fabric. If you want your costume to look like one of the dragons from the movie, then you will need to find some interesting fabric that works on it’s own and also looks good with scales printed on it.
The first thing we did was take our pattern and use it to cut out all of the parts for the costume. The pattern comes with instructions on how to put all of the pieces together so that wasn’t too hard. We bought some craft foam scales from Michael’s (the arts and crafts store) and used those as guides to cut out our scales from green glitter vinyl using my Silhouette Cameo cutter. This was definitely the most time consuming part but it gave us very professional looking scales.
You can see in the picture below how we put all of this together for our dragon costume.
On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.