Happy New Year - Year of the Dragon

Hello
This is Pam from Papillon Digital Designs & The Bugbytes today at Shes a Sassylady.
Thank you Sheila for having me as a designer on your blog.
I want to wish you all a very very Happy New Year.
This year according to Chinese New Year is the year of Dragon.
Some of my childhood years was spent in Malaysia which does have a huge Chinese population and New Year is celebrated with  dragon dance in the streets. I loved it.
Year of the Dragon - I am also a big fan of science fiction and love to read this genre books. And yes at last we also have the last book of Wheel of Time to be released soon. So dragon was foremost in my mind. As I was telling my son about it he wanted to do a project based on Dragon.
So today I present you his project in which I just helped him a tad bit.
A dragon puppet and a dragon card

My younger son found this video in youtube and here is the link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-y-zKP0Qo. Our dragon did not come as cute as this guy's but and not bad for a first attempt. He is planning to decorate it further.
Now the image on the card is from silhouette studio.

I just flipped and welded it. But had a slight problem when welding it as it would not just weld. When such a thing happens try filling the image with color. It will mostly refuse to fill up.

That means that the image is not closed and the path is open somewhere. You can confirm this by selecting the image and double clicking it. It will go into path mode. (In this case I had to ungroup first, as it has 3 images. Double click will only work on single image or compound image. It will not work on grouped images. So ungroup first. As you can see the 2 smaller loops are filled so they are closed but the dragon itself is not) Amongst all the grey square nodes you will see a red dot somewhere like this

Now it is simple - just zoom so that you can see the region better. You will see 2 red dots. That means the path is open there

Grab hold of one of the red dots. If it is very close to the other red dot then just grabbing the red dot will make it go like a magnet to the other dot and close up with a snap. Else just pull alongside the other and it will snap closed and if you had filled color before then it will automatically get filled.

Now once it is closed you can weld.
So once I did that I copied the changed image and then flipped aligned overlapped and welded it to make a shape card. We cut it out using silhouette and then my son assembled it.
For the puppet I used 1 paper towel roll and cut it into 3 pieces. You can also do this with card stock rolled into tube. For photo purpose I am using just a paper rolled into tube.

Then cut one of the rolls into 3 smaller pieces. These 3 smaller pieces are added to the body to give strength  like ribs.

Now cut the other 2 - one piece - the front to look like a maw/mouth and the 2nd piece to look like a tail

Paint the 2 pieces. You need not paint the 3 smaller pieces.
Pierce the front and back ( the hole in the front piece should be at it's back with enough space left so that you can glue the body piece to it. Vice verse for the back piece) and weave in a chopstick

Here's the front ( you do this after you paint. This is just a demo piece in white)

Now make sure you cut the front properly and give it a maw 

and DO NOT CUT LIKE THE ONE BELOW

If you do your dragon will look more like an eel. Talking from experience as this is how our first face looked like lol

We then recut the face to look more like a dragon

Now for the back piece

Now take some crepe paper (you can use 2 colors - I have used green and red) and cut them to the body length you want and glue together alternating the colors to form a width which can go around the tubes and cover . Then glue the ribs - smaller 3 tubes inside and glue the body to the front and tail tubes

Add eyes and brows and teeth and lips to front piece and decorate the tail further and have fun with the puppet
Here's another look at the puppet my son made not yet complete to his satisfaction as he wants to work on the head more

Wish you all a Happy New Year once again.