Hi, and welcome back to my channel, Commas and Ampersands!
My name is Sarah and today I'm going to be teaching you how to make a super-rad dragon egg.
I first started making dragon eggs in 2015.
I found a basic tutorial online
and I decided to try and recreate the book descriptions
of Daenerys Targaryen's eggs from Game of Thrones.
So this is what I came up with.
Still pretty good after three years.
I now have dragon eggs in all different kinds of sizes.
So we've got the big -
- those big ones over there, we've got some more medium-sized ones
and we've even got little baby ones.
It's raining really heavily outside so if that screws with the sound, I'm sorry.
I'm trying to FILM, Mother Nature.
That actually worked a little bit. The rain's stopping.
Magic! I love making these dragon eggs.
They're a lot of fun. I love posting about them on Instagram.
A lot of people contact me and say, y'know, "Where did you get them?"
I made them. "How did you make them?" I posted a step-by-step
photo tutorial on my blog ages ago.
BUT I decided to make a video to
make it a little bit easier, so you can see exactly
how I make these dragon eggs.
This is the one that I will be making in the video today. It turned out pretty well.
I'm very happy with it.
But you can make it any colour you want, you can make it any kind of design you want,
you can even forgo the nail polish entirely and just stick the thumb tacks in there.
Here's how I make them.
You want a workspace where you're not worried about spilling any nail polish
so I've just set down a table cloth and an old placemat that I tend to use for my crafting projects.
You also want a piece of cardboard that's big enough for
the amount of pins that you have to paint.
You'll be pushing the tacks into this box and it'll be keeping them straight
so that you don't have to worry about them falling over while you're painting them.
I'll be using a medium styrofoam egg,
some opaque nail polish for the base,
glitter nail polish for an accent,
clear top coat to tie it all together.
I'll be painting these on thumb tacks.
Grab an old knife you're not worried about ruining,
some nail polish remover just in case,
a bowl to put your tacks in,
and glue that works well with styrofoam.
First things first, get your thumb tacks ready and start placing them into the cardboard.
I've already created holes in this piece because I've used it before
but if you want to make a new hole, all you need to do is
shove it through the cardboard until it sits in there firmly.
I place and paint all of my thumb tacks at the same time
but for this video I'm only going to be showing you a small section
just so that you can get an idea of what I did.
Once you've placed all your tacks, grab your opaque nail polish that you'll be using for the base coat
and give it a good shake, give it a roll around in your palms ...
make sure you can open it on camera. That's always a great idea.
For this egg, I'm going to be using a nice kind of greeny-blue colour.
And it's quite thick, so I only really need one coat over the top of the thumb tacks.
Because you are painting so many thumb tacks at the same time,
your nail polish will start to dry out and get a little bit gluggy.
In cases like that, just grab your nail polish remover,
put a few drops into the bottle of nail polish that you're using,
give it a good shake, make sure the nail polish remover is mixed in well,
and then you can start painting once more.
It'll be much easier when you're applying a coat like this
It may be a little bit thinner than you're used to, but you can just apply
a second coat and it'll get the same amount of coverage.
And they're still looking pretty uniform once they're finished.
Next, I grab my glitter nail polish. You don't have to use
this on every tack. I painted about 400
and I only used glitter on about 100 of them. It just provides a nice
accent that you can insert throughout the egg.
There you go; you can see the difference between the glitter and the plain ones there.
Once your tacks have dried, grab a clear top coat of nail polish
and just apply that to every tack.
This'll stop it from chipping when you're staring to work with it.
Once you've done that, you want it to sit for about 12 hours.
Hello. I'm recording my voiceovers at the moment.
This is one thing that I really want you to pay attention to.
When I say "leave it for 12 hours", I am not shitting you.
I am not saying "leave it for 12 hours" because I'm lazy.
When you paint your nails, you're not really, like, pressing down on them
immediately afterwards or an hour afterwards.
That will ruin your nail polish. And you will be doing that a lot when
you are constructing your dragon egg. Paint your thumb tacks one night, go to bed.
If you're working the next day, do the assembly the next night.
I promise you, the longer you leave them, the better they will look.
Just learn from my mistakes, because I regretted it every single fucking time.
Here is one that I prepared earlier. This is about 400 thumb tacks.
Just grab a knife—not one that you're worried about ruining—
and start pushing them out from the underside.
They will start popping out pretty easily, but some of them will need
a little bit more encouragement. As you go, grab the ones
that have already come out and just pop them in a bowl to the side so that
you don't have a wobbly work surface that you're trying to press things into.
You will get to the stage where some of the thumb tacks
are standing up in the cardboard but they're still not coming out
by pushing the knife in. So you can either grab the knife
and kind of flick them out like that
or you can do it by hand.
Now that all of your thumb tacks are out of the cardboard, you can grab your egg shape.
Mine has a handy indent at the bottom, which is where I always place my first tack.
You just want to drive it straight into the styrofoam.
Make sure it's in there, it's not sticking up at all,
it's not loose. And then you can grab
the rest of your thumb tacks and start placing them
in a clockwise direction.
You want to make sure that every single thumb tack is overlapping with another one
because this is how they stay in the egg.
This is how they don't just, like, fall out whenever you move it.
So you can see there we've got just a little clockwork pattern going on.
And we're going to continue that around the egg,
right up to the top.
Don't worry too much if your circles are uneven or if they look messy.
It's not about neatness.
It's just about making sure that the thumb tacks are overlapping
as much as possible.
After a few rows, you'll realise that your egg can actually stand up
pretty well on its own. It may lean a little bit to the side—that's totally fine.
But this just means that you can take a little bit of a break
without worrying that the egg is going to start rolling off the table.
I have not started inserting any of my glitter thumb tacks
until I'm a few rows in, and then I start just
putting them whenever I actually remember to put one in.
I was gonna do it every four but then I forgot.
And it doesn't really matter 'cause it still looks amazing
because look at that shimmer.
LOOK AT IT.
You keep going all the way up. You'll notice that your rows start
evening out. They start looking a little bit more uniform.
As you get closer to the top, your circles will obviously become smaller
as your egg gets narrower.
Despite my knowing exactly how many thumb tacks
I usually use for this type of egg,
I still ran short because every egg is different,
every overlap is a little bit different. So I was about three short
and I used the ones
that I had painted as an example for this video.
I ordinarily wouldn't do this but since I wanted to finish this
and since it was only a couple, it was totally fine.
For the last pin, you want to make sure that it's going to
finish off the dragon egg. So pop it in there.
Make sure it all looks good.
But the problem is it's not overlapping with anything, so take it back out
and, where you've punctured the hole, pop a little bit of glue
and then put that thumb tack back in there and hold it firmly in place
for about a minute.
Once it's done, you have your finished egg shape.
I would recommend leaving this to dry for a little bit, just leaving the glue
to kind of settle in place.
But if you knock it out, if you knock it over or anything like that,
you can just take the thumb tack out and reglue it. That's not a problem.
And that is basically how we get to this finished product!
So go for gold,
use whatever colours you want, use whatever
polishes and finishes you want.
If you use this tutorial and post about them on Instagram,
please use the hashtag #CAADragonEggs. I will put that hashtag in the downbar.
Some people have already started posting pictures that they've made with
the tutorial on my blog and they are sooooo beautiful.
So there's inspiration for you guys there,
and there's also a chance for me to just
be in awe
of what you have created.
SO SHINY.
As you can see, these are, like,
the top three that I had to use from the backup set.
When I put them in, you could very clearly see thumb marks on them, you could see my
fingerprints on them. Because it was only a few, I just put
another coat of the nail polish and then another coat of top coat over the top of it.
And it's dried looking pretty great so you can hardly tell the difference.
Pretty bloody easy! I hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did, remember to give me a thumbs up!
If you want to see more from me, just hit subscribe.
If you have any questions about the process or about the products that I used
just let me know in the comments and I will get back to you. Thanks for watching! I'll see you guys next time.
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