Primary materials for egg: Newspaper, tape, toilet paper, glue, joint compound, wood filler, acrylic paint, epoxy.
For holder: Toilet paper, glue, joint compound, rocks, acrylic paint, epoxy.
Around the day I finished my first dragon egg, I went to an art-supply store and learned about interference paint, which changes color and opacity depending on the angle of view. I immediately thought something like that would look cool on an egg shape, because the curves would mean that sections are always coming in and out of opacity.
Besides using the new paint, I also wanted to try making this out of toilet paper instead of paper napkins like the first one.
The basics of the construction are pretty simple: a newspaper and tape core, covered in toilet-paper mache. Because the first egg was so rough and irregular, I wanted to make this one much more smooth, even, and symmetrical.
For extra smoothness I decided to try coating it with wood filler. That worked great to even out imperfections in the papier mache, but it created a new problem: it was so thin in parts that the wood filler could flake off quite easily. On top of this, my design has bumps on the egg where it fits into the holder, and I could foresee the bumps quickly losing their wood filler and paint. To solve this, I covered the egg and the holder in two layers of liquid epoxy, to seal everything in.
I began this project to use interference paint, but in the end, it hardly has any. By the time I got to that step, I had painted the egg turquoise and liked how it looked, so I didn’t want to cover it up. There’s only a very light layer of lilac interference paint. This does provides an interesting subtle visual element, but it’s too faint to really see here. For the look I originally envisioned I’ll probably have to make a third egg.
As for the holder, it went through various design iterations. I didn’t want to repeat what I did for the first egg, and I thought of making a triangle or cube for the base, but eventually decided on a bowl shape. I glued rocks to the bottom for its feet. I then built up some fairly simple designs on the bowl and around the rocks. I wanted it to look good, but the egg is the star.
All steps relating to wood filler and sealing and epoxy are the same here as for the egg.