Dragon with
Gaudi-style mosaic

In 2017, our workshop received an interesting order. The clients wanted to decorate their garden with a mosaic dragon sculpture in the style of the famous Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi.

What is Gaudi style?

As you know, Gaudi's style belongs to the Art Nouveau, although the architect used elements of a variety of styles in his work, following his imagination. His mosaic is a riot of colors and a combination of completely different materials.

No wonder his dragon lizard is one of the symbols of Barcelona.

In order to realize the desire of customers as realistically as possible, we took the most famous Gaudi lizard as the basis of the sculpture.

We agreed on the dimensions of the sculpture with the architect, approved the sketch with the customer and got down to business. To begin with, we took a whole piece of styrofoam, redrawn the outline according to a small sketch and moved it to its natural size. Then, focusing on the sketch, we took pieces of styrofoam 10 cm thick and began gluing them together, reinforcing them in parallel for strength.

Then, following the sketch, we began to carve our dragon. After the sculpture was completely cut out, we sanded the surface, stretched the reinforcing mesh and covered it with a concrete mixture in several layers. When the concrete mix was completely dry, we plastered it again: it was important to achieve a perfectly flat surface.

The next step was drawing the lines along which the mosaic would be laid out. And then – the most long-awaited creative moment - the direct laying out of the mosaic. For decoration, we, just like Gaudi, chose a ceramic mosaic of bright juicy shades.

After installing the mosaic, we started the final stage of work – grouting the seams and removing excess suture filler.

The next task was to make sure that the dragon had its own story and did not look like a "new model". Therefore, we decided to age the sculpture a little: we sanded the protruding parts, thereby smoothing out all the corners and giving the dragon some wear with time. It is also important that thanks to this, the sculpture has become smooth and safe for children's games. So our first dragon was born, big and colorful. The customer liked the result so much that he wanted another one – the same, only small! We kept the shape and silhouette of a large dragon, but for the mosaic we chose a more restrained color scheme, using various shades of green, blue and sand colors.