Toothless 3D Illuminated Painting

I guess there are not many kids theese days who don’t know him:
Toothless from “How to train your dragon”. I thought I give it a try, since after the firefighter truck for my son, my daughter now also wants some “light effects” in her room.

So the original ideea was to create a Toothless model from the 2nd movie, which can also light up in blue. The final model will be a painting around a toothless model, with blue leds in the mouth to simulate the plasma, a short blue led strip on top of Toothless to light up the spines, 2 uv blacklight led strips on the side to simulate the light on the scales (which will be painted with blacklight paint) a photoresistor which detects day/night (at night it will turn on a night light by default) and an infrared distance measuring sensor on its nose, as a trigger for the “plasma” and to cycle through all programs.

So I started to model the dragon in Blender, and prepared it afterwards
for printing in Pepakura. After some hours of work it was cut out and sticked together.

The next step was a layer of paper mache for it to get stronger, and some black spraypaint as the base color.

Then I used some almond seeds and again paper mache to make the teeth.
And for the eyes I used a part from a plastic bottle and the printed eyes.

Now for the electronic part, I started to put everything together on a board. Mainly an Arduino Pro Mini will do all the tricks described at the beginning. It is easy to use and can be easily reprogrammed if changes are needed. I just really need to work on my electronics layout and soldering skills.

I added also the electronic parts: light resistor on the right wing, proximity sensor on the nose, side uv led strips and 2 blue leds in the mouth.

In the next step I had to create back spikes from silicone, since the led strip from the back had still to be visible through the spikes.

Painting it took also many days. First layer is with ordinary acrylic paint, the second one was acrylic uv paints in some areas near the uv light, like stars, clouds, spots on Toothless, etc.

The result you can see in the introduction of this instructable. Hope you had fun ...

Here you can find more of my projects.

http://blog.familie-fratila.de/