For my props project, we were tasked with making an animal out of foam.

First, you have to choose what animal you want to make and then decide if you’re just going to make the head or a full body. I chose to make one of the dragons for the How To Train Your Dragon series, specifically one of Toothless’ kids who we’ll just call Dart that appear at the end of the third film.

Once you’ve picked your animal, it’s time to sketch out your animal. This is also where you decide if you’re just making the head or if you’re making the head and the full body. Originally I was going to do Dart’s full body and just try to simplify the features. But because Dart’s design is so complicated and requires me to look at multiple different angles of her, I decide to do just the head.

Once all that is decide, grab a square piece of foam and sketch out your design. Now that you have your sketch, go over to the bandsaw and cut off to excess pieces of foam. Make sure you have all your pieces cut out and remember to be careful when working with any saw and any other sharp objects!

Now that we have our head, it’s time to take a little more off of those hard to reach places.

Next, we make the horns, or whatever they’re suppose to be. First, I look back at my reference photo to determine how many “horns” I need to make. I need two big horns, one on each side of her face and two I cut out two big circles for the bottom and two slightly smaller circles to go on top. I just had to eyeball how big I needed them to be.

After that, you just trace the head onto another foam square. Depending on how thick you want your animal’s head to be will determine how many layers of foam you’ll need. I just went with 5 just to be safe.

Next, is to repeat the same steps until you have enough.

Once your circles are cut out, apply glue to the bottom of the smaller circle and then on the top of the bigger circle. When the glue feels tacky, place the two tacky sides together and wait for the glue to dry completely. Repeat the same process with the other circles.

Now that we have our horns, it’s time to shape them into horns. Using a box cutter, I cut off any excess

Next up is to glue all you head layers together.

Once everything is glued together, I start sanding down the edges to make them more round.

When I feel that everything is sanded down enough, I take it over to the paint station and paint it with white paint. This will act as the primer for when we add the black to everywhere except the tips of the ears and the eyes.

Once that’s dry, I paint the places where there’s black with black paint. I try to be careful not to accidentally get the paint where I don’t want the paint to be, like the eyes and the end of the nose.

Then, we paint the eyes blue.

Once my paint was try, I go for a second layer of paint and clean up some mistakes I made. Then, when the paint is dry, I apply some glue to the bottom of my horns and wait until the glue is tacky. I had a little bit of last minute changes to the design because the horns that were going to be on each side of her face were too big. I tried cutting them down and sanding them, but that didn’t really work so I had to scrap those to an glue the other horns to the back of the head.

And that’s it! Say hello to Dart!