This is a tiny little sculpey dragon, who I call the Feathered Firespitter. I wanted to try doing feathery wings for a change (though, I think of them as being modified scales instead of feathers), which was, I must say, a lot harder than I expected! But I'm happy with it. He's supposed to be very young, hence the big eyes and the babyish proportions.

In real life he is very, very shimmery and shiny--he was painted first in acrylics in carefully blended shades of red, orange and yellow ochre, with gold highlights, and then on top I used gold and red interference paints. Interference paints contain tiny mica particles that create an iridescent effect in sunlight--unfortunately, this is very hard to capture on camera! Mostly it just creates glare in the photo, ruining the colors and making it really hard to get a good picture.

I also...may have gone a little overboard with the interference paints. ^_^;; (to the point that I obscured my own detailed paint job. Darn!). The shinyness is addictive.

I didn't use a wire frame with this one, except in the legs and wings. I also used apoxie sculpt to help strengthen the feet and wings, and to form the wingclaws. He's got glass eyes, which were baked into the clay, and he was finished off with a layer of matte varnish.

I'll put up some more pictures as soon as I manage to take good ones; he's very difficult to photograph because of his size and the iridescent shine. If you're interested, there's a couple of pre-paint-job shots of him in my scraps.

Original sculpey, wire, apoxie sculpt, glass eyes, acrylics, Golden brand interference paints, matte varnish.