Hey everyone! I'm currently working on a production of Shrek the Musical, and being a puppet person I was assigned the task of creating the dragon. I've been concentrating my efforts on the head, and I think it's coming along swimmingly. I took LOTS of pictures, but I chose just a few to show the process. Excuse the messy work space!


First, I built a "skull" out of plastic canvas onto a Styrofoam wig head. I like to use plastic canvas as a base for larger puppets, since it's pretty cheap and can be manipulated easily.


Next, I covered the skull in gaff tape. This way I can hot glue foam to the skull without also gluing it to the wig head, so the outer part can be removed should the mechanism need to be repaired.


Foam time! Just a general dinosaur-ish shape. After this picture was taken, the cheeks were rounded slightly more and the lip given a curve.


Here is the final mechanism. I carved out a cavity in the head, sawed off the neck, and made a hole through the lower jaw for the dowel. A tutorial for the mechanism used can be found here. The pipe I used is a bit heavier, but is still fairly springy.


A hole is drilled in the bottom jaw of the mechanism, and is threaded with yarn. The jaw is sandwiched between a plate of plastic canvas (to keep the yarn in place) and another piece of foam, which was trimmed and shaped later.


It's alive!


The skinning process begins. We decided to use a soft baby blanket material, the bumps on which give the appearance of scales in a certain light. It was hot glued on in places, then hand stitched to lay flat.

That's where I am right now. I'll post more pics as I get closer to completing her!

Well, I think you are doing an amazing job so far, its never easy to make something of that size, but you are nailing it!!
I love the simplicity of the mechanism too, its one of Pagestep's vids, and you gotta love that guy, he is so incredibly helpful and I love the fact that he pretty much just 'eyeballs' the things that he is making to get the right sizes and shapes, and he doesn't use any fancy equipment, he even appeared to be making the mechanism with old bits of chair, whilst making it resting on an old chair!! oh man, ive got to be more like him!!
Thanks for sharing your process with us so far, id love to see more and it would be great to see a vid of your dragon moving too.

Very exciting project! You're doing great with it! Love your choice for the skin. I can even see the texture in the photo.

Hey COOOL! You managed to get the mouth mechanism working EXCELLENT!   Hope we can see some more of the finished puppet, even in action with a vid(?)

What are the final dimensions of this puppet? I am about to start directing Shrek and am thinking we are going to need to go really big on this thing. I would love to make it myself but as a total novice at this (only having made sock puppets) I am worried about spending a lot of time and money only having to end up renting it because it looked bad.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Creating the dragon for Shrek is a big (pardon the pun) undertaking. If you have no experience in puppet building I would suggest renting it. In the Broadway and tour versions of the show the puppet is quite large and in fact is actually suspended from the fly system when off stage. Now with that all being said since you are the director perhaps you can re-envision the scene. Must it be done with a large dragon puppet. In the original the actress preforming the dragons voice appears at the end in costume as the dragon. Perhaps this could be done for the first scene.  Perhaps it could be combined with a shadow show so you could get the feeling of a large scale dragon.  Just thinking out loud here.