93% Accurate Game of Thrones Dragon Egg (Extremely Pic Heavy)

This is a project that I was working on for a friend's birthday, and since her birthday was yesterday, I am now free to post about it without fear that she might happen upon this thread in the course of her GoT Googlings.

So, here's where the project began. I started with a side-view made by Blind Squirrel Props...and proceeded to butcher them in Photoshop to change the shape to something I thought was a little closer to SA. I printed out two copies and glued them to some bristol board I had:



Then I also cut out a circle for the diameter of the egg, and spliced the three pieces together to form a rough shape to work from. I don't have a lathe, and wanted to try to keep this build simple and cheap (I later went back on that "simple" thing) so this seemed like the best option.



Then I added insulation foam I had lying around:



Shaped it:



Sealed it with wood glue: (Again, trying to work with materials I had on hand)



Then started refining the shape with spackle: (You can see the form I made in the second picture to help gauge the symmetry)



Considering this is just going to be sculpted onto, it doesn't need to be perfect, but not too shabby:



Now, remember when I said I abandoned simplicity? Here's where that kicked in. I had originally planned on just making a scale template and making a ton of them in Apoxie Sculpt and applying them to the egg like so many before me. Then I made the mistake of looking at my reference folder, and decided that simply wouldn't work.

So I pored over tons of reference pictures like these:



And quickly realized that the prop makers handmade every. single. scale. Every one was different and my desire to have one of THE dragon eggs from GoT caused my detail oriented mindset to go into overdrive, leading me to this:



That's right, I chose to hand draw every scale onto the egg based on the white/cream colored egg's scales, since that's what I had the best reference for. (All three eggs' scales are actually different amazingly)

It was around this time (After many hours of scale-drawing) that I discovered the top of my egg was too pointy on top, since I couldn't fit all the scales on. Time to reshape:



Much better, now to apply a quadrant system to the hemispheres to better track where to place scales:



And on with the drawing. You'll see that I was checking off scales in Photoshop as I drew them. Over time, there were specific scales that I found that were unique enough to match up various sides of the egg...and I also named a few of the scales over the probably 15+ hours it took me to draw these suckers:



Hey, looking good, I'm almost done:



DOH! I still need to do the back!



The crown is actually there in cast the egg falls...plus it helps set the mood. :lol And here it is after TONS of drawing:



Combining all of my reference images, there was only one column of scales I had incomplete reference images for, an the top of the egg (Something that no replica has come close to emulating) I used shots of the green egg, since it's the only one with really high quality reference images for it. I was able to work out what most of the scales I couldn't see should look like, and wherever possible based that missing row on scales from other eggs...hence why this is 93% accurate and not 100%. (That last 7% still drives me crazy)

So now that the drawing was done, it was time to apply Apoxie Sculpt to form the scales. I couldn't actually overlay the scales, or I'd lose my reference drawing on the surface, so instead, I had to carefully taper each scale towards their top and edges to give the illusion of it sinking under the row above it, and I think I was fairly successful:



Part 2 coming in a moment...

-Nick

Attached Thumbnails