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Head and willow body before carving |
Head detail showing eye hole |
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Finished Head |
Finished Head showing tongue and Bad tooth |
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Colden Infant and Junior School had planted a living willow dragon body and found a log for it's head. It was such a perfect log for a head that when I was asked to carve it, I had no doubts about the design. The right hand side of the snout was already there and all I had to do was make the left hand side match. There was a hole that when filled in would make a perfect eye and a lump on the other side that could be carved into a matching eye. There was a large branch sticking out to one side that could be a tongue. In my minds eye the head was like an alligator's with a tongue like Alsatian dog's. Unfortunately the commissioners vision was of a forked tongue. Research showed that a high proportion of illustrators of dragons have avoided the question of a tongue and often, if the mouth is open, there is no tongue. Where there is a tongue it is rarely forked although in some black and white drawings the flames coming from the mouth might look like a forked tongue.
The children at the school had no doubts about what a dragon looked like as a large proportion claimed to have seen one and knew what it sounded like. I had given the dragon some lovely alligator like teeth but due to a fault in the wood I had had to cut away what would have been gum beneath one tooth. I told the children that this was because the dragon's bad tooth, and they were sympathetic as many of them had wobbly teeth too