Dragon Skull (untitled)

animal apoxie Bone Art deer skull dragon sculpting skull Skull art

I started with a deer skull, a whole lot of apoxie, and a dream, and I began sculpting scales.

I added more scales and rimmed the eye sockets with small pebble-like scales.

Here, I took a handful of vertebrae and trimmed them, then secured them to the skull using apoxie, and lo, I had spikes.

I left one of the small vertebrae untrimmed and secured it to the snout as a lovely snout spike!

Now for the eye spikes! These are small vertebrae, like the one one the snout, trimmed and secured to the top of the eye sockets.

The scales are finished! This is still a work in progress, but it's coming along beautifully!

I tried a couple of different techniques to figure out the teeth. It was too late to boil the skull and remove the teeth, given all the sculpting I had done onto the skull at this point. Herbivorous teeth are very compact, and when I tried sculpting teeth on top of the originals using only apoxie, they were too bunched together, so I scrapped that idea.

Finally, I bought coyote teeth and grafted them on top of the original teeth using apoxie, doing my best to smooth them out while it was still malleable.

I filed the teeth to smooth things over as best I could, and used the dremel to create ridges between the teeth, then it was time to paint! I turned to my trusty black paint with golden shimmer for the scales as a base coat, then I laid down a base coat of white on the teeth so the apoxie and the original and new teeth all matched. THEN it was time to try and color-match the skull on top of the white.