Dragon art.DRAGON ART FIRE-BREATHING OR FRIENDLY, winged, glittering glit·ter n. 1. A sparkling or glistening light. 2. Brilliant or showy, often superficial attractiveness. 3. Small pieces of light-reflecting decorative material. intr.v. , colorful and scaly scal·y adj. 1. Covered or partially covered with scales. 2. Shedding scales or flakes; flaking. scaly skin condition characterized by scales; scalelike. , the fifth through eighth grade students in Laura Reveness' art classes created mythical myth·i·cal also myth·ic adj. 1. Of or existing in myth: the mythical unicorn. 2. Imaginary; fictitious. 3. monsters that might make other dragons turn green with envy. Miss Reveness explains, "Our objectives were to get students to create a three-dimensional animal that had a creative personality and expression, and to paint them in a non-realistic color scheme. We were after anything except green dragons named Puff." To begin, teacher and students discussed the basic forms that make up a dragon's body. The students talked about how a dragon's body might look, how the legs and arms are joined to the body and what claws, scales, tails, tongues, horns and wings look like. Everyone is interested in dragons, so there was plenty of motivation in the classroom. Students started to form the dragon body by crumpling newspaper and cinching its shape with masking mask·ing n. 1. The concealment or the screening of one sensory process or sensation by another. 2. An opaque covering used to camouflage the metal parts of a prosthesis. tape. The next step was to form and attach the newspaper legs, then add the spine, neck and head. The dragon's outer skin was made of one or two coats of pariscraft. The plaster dries in about twenty minutes; a slower-drying, less expensive alternative might be to use papier-mache. At this point the dragon looked like a plucked pluck v. plucked, pluck·ing, plucks v.tr. 1. To remove or detach by grasping and pulling abruptly with the fingers; pick: pluck a flower; pluck feathers from a chicken. chicken. The change from chicken to artistic dragon proceeded as students used plaster to form details such as nostrils, eyes, teeth, claws and ears. The head (or sometimes heads) were added last and some artists chose to add a separate floppy jaw. Children often helped one another hold things in place. Pencil stubs stubs The shares of equity in a firm that is financed almost completely with debt. Stubs are often created when firms go through a leveraged buyout or pay big cash dividends in order to fend off a takeover. were used to create horns. Wings were cut out of cardboard and added, after the dragon was painted, by slitting the body and gluing them in place. Before painting, students talked about color schemes. When children asked what color they should paint the beasts, it was suggested they ask their dragons. After painting, dragons got glitter, feathers, felt tongues or other imaginative additions. For protection, each dragon was sprayed with a coat of clear plastic gloss. Somewhere along the line, dragons usually got christened as well. Names included "Big Blue Sponge," "Double Header," "Grif," "Sparky spark·y adj. spark·i·er, spark·i·est Animated; lively. spark  i·ly adv. ," "Fireball fireball, very bright meteor leaving a trail in the sky that can remain visible for several minutes; often a distinct sound, perhaps caused by very low frequency radio waves, is associated with it. ,"
"Eleanor" and, of course, "Dragon Breath." In art,
as in nature, dragons vary in size. "Big Blue Sponge" was
more than 3' (9 m) across. Due to the newspaper core, however, the
beasts were surprisingly lightweight. It takes students, meeting twice
a week for ninety-minute classes, about a month to create their beasts.
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