And so, with the staff selected and sized, we started to make the dragons, already having decided that covering it in stickers of silhouettes and carving those away afterwards. The first few dragons, I just searched online for literally that, dragon silhouettes (and after dragon stencils) and placed some adhesive sheet over the screen to trace them. After that, I realized that my Dragon Delves book has top-down profile pictures of all of the dragons! Noice! However, without a backlight, I was unable to trace onto the adhesive sheet. Thus came tracing paper and double-sided adhesive sheets! I used a sheet of acetate to keep me from denting the book with the pencil (or outright writing on it when the pencil tip tore through), and that worked a treat. And then, we discovered another bonus, using said plastic sheet, I could place that over the cellphone tracings paper, and trace them AGAIN like that! And as needed and wanted, modify the wings, tail, head and optionally visible legs as I wanted, as I did when re-tracing dragons from the book more than once. We also freehanded some lil tiny dragons in there in the remaining available tracing paper spaces. And of course, we have one stencil of one of my chainmaille dragons in there as well.
Cutting them out... took considerably longer than I was anticipating. I at first considered trying to salvage the background of the tracing paper, but quickly abandoned that due to the remaining page being too weak. As long as I have the cellphone dragons, that's fine, the others are from the book or freehand. I also tested cutting them out with a boxcutter tip vs scissors, but there's negligible difference between the two. And so, we continued to slowly trim out the dragons.
More coming once I've progressed the staff further
Finished Month xx, 2026
