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.
And with them all cut out and attached, we discovered a dilemma... the bark, this old, is too brittle to be able to make clean cuts on, and it kept chipping out. As well, the particularly dry spots where the bark had already been knocked off towards the bottom, which we generally covered with dragons, would probably be even more brittle. So, our solution, give the staff a coat (or 2 in the long run) of varnish to glue all of the bark together, and try carving it like that.
And it worked! Thankfully, we will be able to continue carving (the alternative being to just sell the staves as plain walking sticks without carving, or perhaps with painting only). With a dragon or two carved, I started to get worried that the exposed edges might get snagged and crumble off while handling the staff carving more, so from this point on, we will be sealing the carved spots with wood glue after every dragon to avoid catastrophe. Though, I've already proven to myself that minor chips can be replaced by gluing in little shards of bark that have been already carved, almost invisibly fitting in, so that works. And the glue will lock in the edges of all of the carvings.
More coming once I've progressed the staff further
Finished Month xx, 2026
