Carving a Dragon from Stone

Steve Bisco is inspired by a medieval dragon in Christchurch Priory.

Christchurch Priory in Dorset, is a cathedral in all but name. It’s one of the largest churches in Britain, reflecting the historical status of Christchurch as an important medieval port on the south coast of England. The Norman core of the building, started in 1094 and finished around 1150, was built in the Romanesque style, with the round arches and heavy columns that preceded the later and lighter Gothic style. It is well worth visiting for its carved stonework and woodcarving. While on such a visit I was stopped short by a small dragon nestling at the foot of one of the columns in the nave, apparently asleep but with its mouth partly open as if ready to strike if disturbed. It was carved in medium relief on the upper surface of one of the limestone blocks at the base of the column. It was probably carved later than the Norman building phase in reference to the mid-12th-century legend of the Christchurch Dragon.

A medieval document records that a visiting party of French monks reported seeing the town of Christchurch consumed in sulphurous flames being breathed by a five-headed dragon. There is no record of what the monks had been drinking, but another French report indicates a lightning storm being the cause of the conflagration – you decide which is most plausible. This dragon thankfully has only one head and it provided me with the inspiration for a stone-carving project, with a little adaptation to extract it from its column base and fit it on an oblong block. I have kept to its local provenance by using Portland stone – Christchurch is just a short hop by sea from the Portland limestone quarries – but any suitable limestone will do.

Not wishing to leave woodcarvers out of this project, I have also carved the same design in oak (Quercus robur), and detailed this process in a separate article. By cutting the pattern out of the oak board, the oak dragon is freestanding, or free-laying, and can more easily be displayed in the house. I reversed the tracing on the oak version to make it face the other way, but this is optional.

Sleeping dragon carving

Drawings and how to resize them

To enlarge or reduce the size of drawings right click on the image to download it and then go HERE to watch a video on how to use paper with a grid to do exactly that.

Making the dragon in stone

To make the dragon in stone, you will need a block of a suitable limestone (preferably Portland, Caen, or similar). The size is not critical provided you can fit the pattern on to it without it being too small to carve the details. The best place to look for good quality carving stone is at the yard of an architectural stonemason. Getting stone cut to a specific size is expensive, so work with whatever size of offcut you can get cheaply from your stone supplier. If the block has one or more broken faces, cut and square them off using the basic stonemasonry tools and techniques for ‘dressing’ a stone. A stonecarver’s toolkit is very simple because the limestone and sandstone ‘freestones’ used for stonecarving have no grain and you can approach a cut from a wider range of angles. This carving requires just a basic set of four stone chisels and three gouges. A few other tools are useful for preparing and shaping a stone: a claw chisel, a bolster and a club hammer are used in the heavier masonry work.

Things you will need

Tools

  • Personal and respiratory equipment
  • 4, 6, 13 & 18mm chisels
  • 6, 13 & 18mm gouges
  • Claw chisel
  • Bolster
  • Club hammer for roughing out
  • Mason’s dummy mallet

Materials

  • Stone: Limestone 270 x 210 x 125mm 

Carving Stone Safely

  • Wear eye protection when carving stone – flying stone chips are sharp.
  • Stone is very heavy. A cubic foot, or 300mm metric cube, of stone will weigh around 70 kilos, so take great care of your back and wear protective footwear. Use lifting gear for heavy pieces.
  • Stonecarving creates a lot of dust, so work outdoors if possible. Wear a suitably rated dust mask and safety eye wear, and take particular care if working with sandstone as silica dust can accumulate in the lungs.

Carving the stone dragon

1. Get your block of limestone and make a full-sized copy of the drawing. Trace the pattern on to some transparency film, and also some card to make a template. If the stone is dry and free of dust you should be able to trace the pattern on to it with carbon paper. If not, use the template and transparency to draw it on

Roughing out 

2. Mark a depth line around the sides 45mm below the top surface.  Scratch in the pattern and depth line with a point as the pencil lines will soon vanish. First cut around the edges with a 6mm chisel, then cut out the surplus stone outside the pattern with a claw chisel down to the 45mm level
3. Use a bolster to square up the vertical edges, then work the ‘floor’ down to a flat and level surface at the 45mm depth line
4. Chisel down the level of the feet and the swirly end of the tail so they stand 18mm thick above the floor. This helps you to see the main parts of the dragon
5. Now shape the body and tail. The body in front of the wings spreads out sideways as the dragon is laying on its stomach. Behind the wings it slopes gradually down into the tail. Round over the sides and leave a ridge to form the dorsal scales later
6. Shape the bat-like wings by carving out the hollows between the spines with the gouges. Try to create a recumbent look by lowering the wings towards the edges. To reflect the curve in the dragon’s posture, the left wing curls under at its outer edge. Use the transparency to redraw the spines as you work down

Carving the detail

7. Before carving the details, check the position of each element with the transparency and keep redrawing with the pencil. The ears slope downwards and outwards in a floppy sleeping position. Hollow them with gouges and shape the outer edges. The sleeping head lays slightly to the dragon’s left, so the left ear lays slightly lower than the right
8. To form the shape of the head, cut around the bulge of the eyes with the 18mm gouge. Shape the crest scale that runs from between the ears to the tip of the nose and carve two side grooves and a central groove along it with the 6mm gouge. Round over the sides of the nose, and mark the position of the mouth

Did you know

Sightings of dragons were common in medieval times. A report from Bures, Suffolk, in 1405 complains that a huge dragon killed a flock of sheep.  A possible explanation for these sightings is a hallucinatory fungus called ergot which could grow on crops of rye, get into the local bread, and cause mass hallucinations.

TOP TIP

One tool that is essential for stonecarving is the pencil.  Before you carve any feature, draw it in carefully first with a hard pencil and check that it is in the right position and looks as you want it. You can then carve with more confidence. It is much harder to correct a bad cut in the stone than it is to rub out and redraw a pencil mark.  

9. Very carefully carve the dragon’s eyes, which have an overhanging brow and upper and lower eyelids separated by a sloping V-cut to show they are closed. Use the corner points of a 6mm chisel to ‘engrave’ the sharp lines, and the 6mm gouge to form grooves from the top of the brow back to the ears
10. Open out the front and sides of the mouth to show a tongue which extends on to the lower lip at the front. Carefully carve the nostrils and the V-grooves which flow from the nose and eyes back around, under, and behind the mouth, looking a bit like gills. Slightly undercut the cheeks and the lower jaw so the head is laying on top of the base
11. Do some more undercutting under the ears to separate the feet from the neck. Carve each foot into four toes, with v-grooves running back along the legs
12. Now refine the shape of the body and the thick tail into their final rounded form, undercutting so it looks three-dimensional on top of the base. Carve the inverted V of the dorsal ridge along the back, and make cross-cuts to create pyramid-shaped dorsal scales
13. The curly end of the tail appears from under the body and wings in low relief and divides into three leaves of the Gothic ‘stiff leaf’ type. Very carefully undercut the edges of the left wing to create the volute shape of the third leaf
14. Finish the wings by running the 6mm gouge along the sides of the ‘spines’ to make them stand out against the wing membranes. Now carve the cross-bars at the outer ends of each flute with the 6mm gouge. Refine and undercut the curved ends of the wing membranes
15. To finish off, undercut the lower edge of each element where it meets the base to make it look detached. Very carefully undercut all the edges of the wings so they look natural. Rework the base surface to remove all cut marks and make it smooth and level – you can push the bolster along like a plane for the final smoothing. Finally, cut a 45º chamfer along all four sides of the block to give the base a neat edge

The stone sleeping dragon is now finished. Wash off all the dust with a hose and tidy up any rough bits. The stone dragon will live quite happily outdoors in all weathers for hundreds of years, unlike its wooden counterpart.

Further reading

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