DIY dragon costume: make a dragon mask out of cardboard!

This is the Chinese zodiac year of the Azure Dragon (青龍), and I was born in a dragon year. It felt like the perfect time to make a dragon costume for Halloween. So I did! As usual, I tried to use items that I already have at home. This post describes how I made a dragon mask from reused shipping box cardboard and put together a DIY dragon costume. Enjoy! If you end up making your own dragon costume, I’d love to see it! 🙂

Jump to: video tutorials, materials, cardboard cutting, assembling and gluing, painting, teeth, complete costume

About the Azure (Blue-green) Dragon (青龍, qīnglóng in Chinese Mandarin): One of the earliest written records of the Azure Dragon goes way way back over 3,000 years ago to a Shang dynasty theological text called the Five Regions’ Highest Deities (五方上帝 Wǔfāng Shàngdì). In this ancient spiritual tradition, five spinning constellations represent the cosmic energy of the Heavens, and five dragon gods (龙神 Lóngshén: black, yellow, green, red, white) preside over the material manifestations of the energy in our world. The Azure Dragon represents the green deity of the Eastern Peak (Mount Tai in Shandong province) and is associated with the wood element and the spring season. In Chinese folklore, the Azure Dragon king has appeared in the form of Áo Guāng (敖廣), the fearsome Dragon King of the Eastern Sea featured in the 16th century Chinese epics Fengshen Yanyi and Journey to the West as well as in modern popular culture video games, the film The Monkey King and the series American Born Chinese. The Azure Dragon also appears in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan and Uyghur texts and art. This is a powerful, millennia-spanning dragon, my friends!

Dragon anatomy: Like Mexican alebrijes and Ancient Greek chimeras, Chinese dragons are mythical creatures with anatomical features from multiple real-life animals: head of a camel, eyes of a rabbit, ears of a cow/bull, horns of a stag and whiskers of a carp (in masculine versions), body of a snake, scales of a carp, belly of a frog, paws of a tiger, and talons of an eagle.

Video tutorials and alternatives

After researching the history and art of azure dragons and many different DIY dragon costume designs, I decided to base my costume off of these video tutorials:

• Jeje Sumberwinong’s Indonesian naga cardboard mask making video and
• Jeje’s painting video. Jeje is an amazing Indonesian costume artist!

Jeje made the masks in the videos for younger kids, so they are quite small. I adjusted the measurements and redesign the mask for my small-medium-sized adult head. My head circumference is 56 cm (22 inches). If you have a bigger head, please adjust the dimensions accordingly.

Adapting and making my somewhat simpler version of Jeje’s design took me several days working 3-4 hours at a time, probably around 16 hours total. A lot of that time was measuring and designing my own version, so hopefully it won’t take you as long. Shorter alternatives are to just make the cardboard version without painting, or just painting it one single color. I researched a bunch of DIY dragon masks before deciding to go with Jeje’s, and here are a couple other dragon mask alternatives that might be useful to consider:

• DIY Western-style cardboard dragon mask by BarbMakesThings
• Pre-cut and pre-creased PaperCraft dragon mask (you assemble and glue; saves time designing, cutting, folding)
• PDF template of dragon mask by Wintercroft (saves time designing/measuring and uses card-stock instead of cardboard)

Materials I used

Base cardboard dragon mask:

• 4-5 medium to large sized cardboard shipping boxes (enough for 7 pieces that are ~21-27 cm x 26-36 cm and a bunch of smaller pieces). I chose the cleanest and lightest/thinnest ones we had around. I recommend saving your two largest flat cardboard pieces (~27×36 cm) for the side manes if you can (I didn’t and wish I did), since bends and folds show up prominently in those finished pieces.
• Scissors strong enough to cut through cardboard.
• Optional: Art knife or box cutter knife with a blade sharp enough to cut through cardboard smoothly. This helps with curves and shaping. Otherwise, use scissors.
• Glue: I used a mini glue gun with ~10 glue sticks. Alternatives: wood glue, PVC craft glue (preferably the “fast-grab” type).
• 2 white plastic spoons for the eyes.
• White paper, card-stock or cardboard for the teeth. One 8.5×11″ letter-sized sheet is enough.

Paint, headrest, clothing:

• Acrylic paint if you want to paint your mask. I used a mix of iridescent and matte acrylics. This is where you can get really creative and make it uniquely your own!
• Optional: 2-3 foam strips to make a head rest inside the mask.
• Clothing to round out your dragon costume. Initially I was going to use whatever green-ish clothing I had around and then decided to splurge and buy this emerald green scaly cape. I also made “dragon scale” pants by painting a resist pattern on a pair of white leggings and dyeing it in indigo.

Below are my design plans for the cardboard pieces and dimensions I cut out and used in the order I cut and constructed them, following the order in Jeje’s video. Please check and adjust the dimensions so the mask fits the head of the person/people wearing it by adding or subtracting lengths of cardboard.

Cardboard cutting: shapes and dimensions

• The dimensions below will fit head circumferences around 56 cm (22 inches).
• Use the first upper jaw shape below to determine your base adjustments since this is the part of the mask that covers most of the head.
• I measured my head width, height and length, and adjusted the rectangular back piece to match my:
  • head height (21 cm top of head to chin),
  • head width plus a few cm on each side for wiggle room (26 cm, ear-to-ear + 3-4 cm on each side), and
  • head length to match the curved back piece of dragon mask jaw (16 cm, tip of nose to back of head).
• I adjusted the remaining dimensions by adding 3-7 cm to each of Jeje’s lengths for his kid-sized masks.
• Jeje uses centimeter (cm) metric measurements, and I also use metric measurements in my step-by-step below.
• I measured, cut and assembled each mask part in the following order. I am showing the cardboard design plans all together so you have an idea of how much cardboard you need and cut.
• Please note that there are 7 large pieces requiring 26-36 cm lengths, so you’ll need 4-5 medium to large-sized boxes.

Dragon upper jaw:

Dragon lower jaw:

Dragon upper head, forehead and nose:

Dragon upper snout/mouth, eyebrows, side manes: I designed mine differently from Jeje because I wanted a more streamlined look. I omitted the whiskers and horns, which are more masculine dragon features. I wanted my design to reflect the flowing, watery nature of the blue-green azure dragon.

Back mane and teeth:

Assembling and gluing

Upper jaw assembly:

A note about what glue to use: I used a glue gun, which was very helpful for these base structures that benefit from a strong and quick-drying adhesive. You can also use wood glue or PVC craft glue but might need to use a removable masking/painter’s tape to hold it together while the glue dries. Make sure to ventilate your work space if you are using glues that off-gas VOCs.

If you use a glue gun: Learn from my mistakes! I made so many mistakes with the glue gun. Jeje must be a glue gun wizard. I could not get smooth glue flow with my cheap $10 mini glue gun no matter what I tried. But I still managed to pull this mask together and withstand lots of Halloween activities, so even my clumsy amateur gluing was good enough!

• Give your glue gun time to heat up fully before using it. Mine took about 5 minutes to heat up enough to melt glue.
• Make sure you glue on a surface where you can catch and remove glue spills and oozes.
• Have glue sticks ready to feed through the glue gun so you have more continuous flow. My glue gun wasn’t advancing the sticks properly, so I had to push the sticks through from the back to get it to come out.
• You can use “dots” of glue to join cardboard surfaces… it doesn’t need a lot to hold cardboard together.
• Be ready to join the glue surfaces within 15 seconds (it hardens quickly!) and hold it in place for 30 seconds to make sure it attaches. I had a bunch of failed joins, so I had to add more hot glue to the surface to try again. In some cases I had too much hardened glue so I carefully peeled the hardened glue off before re-applying fresh melted glue.
• If the glued joints are not stable or are important ones you want to reinforce, you can add more got glue on the inside joints. I made the mistake of gluing on the outside at first – see the hot glue gun mess above.

Gluing on the inside to reinforce a joint as below – much cleaner!

Lower jaw assembly:

I did a test-assembly of the lower jaw before gluing to check that I would fit over the upper jaw and also fit my head:

Gluing on the inside joints, yay! Much better.

Glue lower jaw to upper jaw:

Shape (with pencil) and cut out the mouth: make it whatever friendly, fierce, etc. expression you want! I used an art knife to cut out these curves.

Make the eyeballs and forehead:

• Cut the handles off the spoons to make the eyeballs.
• Cut the forehead shape out of cardboard.
• Shape and add the forehead and eyes: I used a removable masking tape to tape the spoons to the forehead shape and then taped the forehead shape to the upper jaw to figure out the glue points before I glued it down:

Assemble the nose and bridge:

• I first cut and shaped the upper part of the nose, then used it to determine the size and shape of the nostrils and bridge.
• For curved pieces like the nose, I cut the cardboard so the ridges/grooves were perpendicular to the curve so I could use them to bend. I used a ruler to help me bend each groove.

Gluing the nostrils to the upper nose (and my hot glue mess!):

Cut the nose bridge with corrugations running up/down, then fold it in half length-wise and cut slits to give it texture and shape:

Glue the nose and nose bridge to the top of the upper jaw:

Cut and glue the top front of the mouth:

Design, cut and glue two eye brows and two bottom eye sockets: be creative and get the look you want! I went for curvy and flowing.

Before gluing, I used removable masking tape to test their location and their look:

Design, cut and glue two side manes:

At this point, I had run out of large plain pieces of cardboard and sadly had to use some Amazon shipping boxes that had printing on them as well as big bends. I was able to cover the printing with 2-3 layers of acrylic paint, but the bend is quite prominent in the finished mask. If you have two large flat cardboard pieces, save them for these side manes.

I designed and cut the first mane out using scissors and an art knife for the tight angles, then I used this first one as a template to trace and cut the second mane:

After gluing the side manes, the mask really looks like a dragon!

If you want a simpler dragon mask, you can stop here, maybe add the teeth and have a very cool and totally recognizable dragon mask. The back spikes and painting will round out the look and make it more colorful but I’d say they are optional.

Design, cut and glue back spikes:

These back spikes were difficult for me because I had run out of big pieces of clean, thin cardboard, so it was hard to find pieces big enough. I made my dimensions proportionally smaller than Jeje’s simply because I didn’t have the right-sized cardboard. I also had a very difficult time gluing these large pieces down before the hot glue hardened. I had to pull and rip the cardboard a couple times to fix my bad glue jobs. It took many tries to get them to glue in place!

Here’s the top spike piece with a fold-over top to glue it to the top of the back surface:

I cut out a wedge from the middle of the top spike to get it to curve and touch the top back surface:

Gluing these two large pieces down was such a hot mess and required all my limbs, so I didn’t take photos of that process. After many bungled glue attempts, I got these two pieces to stick, finally yay!

Here’s the finished cardboard construction!

Optional head opening shaping and head band:

The bottom front opening was tight for my round head, so I cut a rounder opening:

The mask was also annoyingly sliding around my head, especially when I turned my head or looked up and down. So I found some old foam packing material and cut strips out to make a head band on the inside. I tested the size and shape of the head band using removable masking tape first, then hot glued the foam strips down:

Painting

Paints I used:

I found that acrylic paints labeled “heavy” or “high viscosity” stuck and showed up most vividly on the cardboard. I painted the acrylic colors directly on the cardboard.

• Base color: green-blue emerald = mix of iridescent blue-green + iridescent green-yellow high viscosity acrylics + dark green “heavy” acrylic.
• Golden accents were painted with the iridescent green-yellow acrylic.
• Blue accents were painted with the iridescent blue-green + ultramarine blue acrylic.
• I drew scales on the back spikes using a metallic gold permanent marker.
• For the eyes, I had a harder time getting the paint to stick evenly. Eventually I found that painting a light coat of a heavy acrylic (I used brown as the background color) first then letting it dry allowed me to make other colors stick on top better. I applied one color layer at a time and let it dry before applying the next: brown base, green and gold for the iris, black for the pupil.

Process:

I’m particular about colors, so I first did a bunch of test mixes on a scrap piece of the cardboard I used for the mask. I wanted to get an iridescent blue-green with blue and gold highlights to both capture the look of the Azure Dragon and also align with the Emerald-blue scaly cape that I wore with the mask. I settled on a mix of the iridescent blue-green + iridescent green-yellow + dark green for the base color:

Lovely, right?

I used cheap sponge brush for most of the large areas of coverage and a flat bristle brush for the more detailed and smaller areas:

Here’s the mask with the base color finished:

I then added some highlights to the side manes, eyebrows and bottom jaw with the iridescent blue-green + blue and the iridescent green-yellow:

I used a metallic permanent marker to add scales to the back:

Adding teeth and fangs

I used some old scrap white drawing paper for the teeth with a thickness somewhere between copier paper and card-stock. I measured the mouth openings of my actual mask to determine the length of the tooth groups. I didn’t want my vision too obstructed wearing the mask since I needed to walk along busy city streets on Halloween, so I made my teeth and fangs much shorter than Jeje did. Since the teeth and fangs were so thin and light, I could use regular craft glue to get them to stick – no hot glue gun needed, yay!

After painting the eyes and adding the teeth:

Separately, I made dragon scale pants using water-based resist on white pants, and dyeing it with natural indigo:

Complete costume with cape and dragon scale pants