A dragon head seems to be the quintessential addition to any D&D Gameroom, so naturally, I wanted to create one for the basement. 
Where to start? - Well I am not the greatest when it comes to working with clay from scratch etc, so I wanted to give myself a leg up on the whole molding thing, and got myself one of these polygonal dragon heads; DIY paper dragon PDF - Etsy. Pretty much what you get is a pdf to print, cut-out, fold, and glue. Theoretically, if you follow the directions you create a polygonal paper dragon. In my case, I leveraged the PDF to create a dragon out of craft foam (3mm EVA foam).
Cutting the framework
To get the right cut-outs I did print the pdf on regular paper as instructed and cut out all 153 pieces. Then came the real fun part of cutting, scoring, and labeling the foam.
To cut each piece I used an Exacto knife to cut around the edges of each cut-out. - Beware of your fingers! Slightly proud of myself for only cutting myself once :)
Scoring was another challenge altogether. In the original instructions, you simply fold along the dotted lines of the printout, which for foam is sadly not as easy. Even though I chose a rather thin foam, I had to score each dotted line rather than simply create a fold. To add some more difficulty to the task the score had to be on the opposite side of the original dotted line, so the fold could happen in the correct directions.
To keep track of all the different pieces, and especially as to where they will have to be connected with other pieces, each piece had to be labeled to match the printed piece. I thought about just referencing the original printout, but in the end decided to label each individual piece, to make assembly easier.
Gluing the frame
After cutting for what felt forever came the actual assembly of the dragon. At first, I used tacky glue, which did work but had to dry for a long time between each step, so I switched to my old trusty friend the hot glue gun.
As far as assembly goes, the process was rather straight forward - Find the matching numbers on the edge of your cutouts and glue those two together.
Stay tuned for Part 2 for adding clay foam to the surface to this beast!
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