I started with wire clothes hangers, as always. You know, these used to be omnipresent. Now, it appears that the only places using them are dry cleaners. They still use the small gauge, white ones. Those work well. For this project I wanted to use the old, heavy gauge hangers. You can still get these online. That's because there were so many made over the years. I wanted to insure a supply so I went on a buying spree a while back. I ended up with 1600 of them. My wife, and my mail person thought I was crazy. Anyway.... I straightened out about 10 of these hangers. I doubled them up and made a length the size of the snake I wanted, about 8 feet long.
I twisted newspaper around the length of the wire. Now you'd think this would be an easy task. But it's actually quite a challenge to get the perfect taper over an 8 foot length. Of course I wanted it bigger on the front end with a nice point on the back end. This took adding many layers of paper and wrapping with masking tape. On the left you can see how it looked in the initial stages. After a lot of twisting and a lot of masking tape I was able to get a more or less smooth surface.
Of course that perfect taper and that smoothness all went away as I coiled the big snake. It's amazing how 8 feel shrinks when you get it into a spiral. You'd never think this was 8 feet long once it was all curled up. So here's a lesson for you. If you stumble upon what looks to be a smallish dragon-snake in the woods, know that she is actually much larger than she looks!
So now there came a second round of smoothing and filling in voids. This time I used wads of phone book paper and masking tape to make the surface smooth once again. This took the better part of a day.
I decided to paper mache the body before worrying about the hood or the head.
I'll start there in the next post.
Thanks for stopping everything you are doing to look at this post, especially those of you at your jobs. That expense report can surely wait a few minutes, right?
