Dan Reeder is one crafty MoFo! He makes amazing monsters and art with paper mache, yeah, that goopy stuff that you always managed to mess up as a kid. Recently he was commissioned to make a Malificent piece from Sleeping Beauty and my goodness, color me impressed. He even used green LEDs to light up the mouth and eyes. Definitely surf around his site, he has a few books for sale and videos that are really interesting.
First, some background. I was asked by a man who lives in France to make a dragon trophy of “Maleficent”, the dragon from Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty”. He wanted a trophy that was as close a rendition of the cartoon as possible, including the lights. You would think that the simple lines would make this an easy task. But it wasn’t easy at all. It was quite a challenge, which I relished. I wanted to make the dragon that the cartoon would be based upon. But I couldn’t improvise very much without straying too far from the original drawings. And the lights were even a bigger challenge. Obviously I couldn’t get lights that would blast out of the mouth, eyes, and nose exactly like the cartoon. And the dragon had to look decent when the lights were turned off.
