Juggernaut

Juggernaut won the Judges Choice Award at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio 2016.

About fifteen years ago, the Cincinnati Zoo gave me a small piece of shed skin from one of their Komodo dragons which I took home and used to make a mold. My plan was to use castings of the scales for the skin of a dinosaur I was working on at the time. The piece of skin was small, only an inch or so and I needed more. The zoo put me in touch with a gentleman from Cincinnati Reptile Rescue, an organization that takes in reptiles that were cute as hatchlings but rapidly outgrew their owners. He had a big five foot monitor that was very gentle and would put up with having a skin mold made of it. I used a skin safe alginate and warm water to make three molds of the lizard that night, one of its back and sides, one of the base of its tail and one of its belly. It seemed to enjoy the first two molds, it might have been the warm water was a bit like a reptile spa. The belly mold was a bit more difficult as the monitor really did not like being on its back and was ready to go back into its habitat. All three of these molds were completed on the newspaper covered coffee table in the living room of a very generous and perfect stranger. This dragon sculpture which is covered with scales from top to bottom actually has the scale castings of a real dragon covering its body. 

Juggernaut is powerful, heavily-armored and athletic. I modeled its front quarters on the anatomy and musculature of a silverback gorilla and its hindquarters on the catlike grace and flexibility of a tiger. The dragon is getting ready to spring downward and out off of a tilted rocky ledge.